Cecil Bell, Jr Lays Out Texas Sovereignty Act, HB 796 in Texas House

I have been working on getting the Texas Sovereignty Act, currently HB 796, to the Texas House floor for almost ten years. This video is of the discussion/debate that happened when it did.

It takes a lot to sell an idea that goes up against prevailing notions and which will be a major step forward in securing limited, constitutional government for our posterity.

In the questioning by the two Democrats of author Cecil Bell, Jr, we heard three notions embedded in our political culture that the Texas Sovereignty Act and Texas Constitutional Enforcement are designed to refute. To reclaim our liberty and the limited, decentralized government envisioned by our framers, we have to defeat three notions:
1) Expert supremacy -- the progressive notion that experts should have the political power to run the lives of the rest of us.
2) Judicial supremacy – the notion that only the judiciary should decide the meaning of our Constitutions.
3) Federal supremacy – the notion that the federal government is the boss and is the final arbiter of decisions about the limits of its own power.

When you combine all three supremacist notions, you get a compete rejection of one of the two pillars of our federated republic. That notion is best stated in the Texas Bill of Rights: “All political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their benefit.” The US Constitution preamble tells us who is the boss in a Republic, We the People of each state. The Declaration says that our government is instituted with “the consent of the governed.”

If you accept and combine expert supremacy, judicial supremacy, and federal supremacy, you get what almost every Democrat believes – that the lawyers in the federal government known as the Supreme Court of the United States are our supreme rulers. And THAT is exactly opposite of what the framers intended and said in the Declaration, the U.S. Constitution, and the Texas Constitution.

Representative Bell presents the Texas Sovereignty Act as a mere procedure to unite Texas in understanding why Texas resists the feds when we do. But the progressives, socialists, and communists in the Democratic Party understand the more fundamental reality of the bill -- the rejection of expert, judicial, and federal supremacy, and a return to the bedrock, original, American notion that the people are the bosses. The Texas Sovereignty Act destroys the foundation underlying our current, progressive, tyrannical, centralized government.

As to the expert supremacy pushed by attorney Erin Gamez, Bell had a good response that the Constitution is written in understandable English accessible to all. You can add that both Constitutions require every official in our federal and state governments to swear an oath to support the Constitution. In Art. 16, Sec 1 of the Texas Constitution, the oath is specified as swearing to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and this State.”

The oath is not sworn to follow whatever the judiciary says it means. Obviously, independent judgment about constitutional meaning is required by the oath for every official in our government, elected or otherwise.

Remember that all political power is inherent in the people and our representatives, NOT inherent in the experts.

As to judicial supremacy, nowhere does the U.S. or Texas Constitutions say that the judiciary is the final or only arbiter of constitutional meaning. The supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution says that it is “the Constitution and laws in pursuance thereof” that are supreme, not the experts, the judiciary, or the feds.

Which begs the question of who decides constitutional meaning. It is the federal judiciary that created the concept of judicial supremacy. Through a series of cases that are self-serving and circular, it interpreted the Constitution to mean that the judiciary is the final interpreter.

The Texas Sovereignty Act properly restores constitutional supremacy as our standard and makes every person who swears the oath responsible for doing their own interpretation and action within their office based on that judgment.