Fifteen years
ago, I assembled a horse and mule cavy to use in my
cattle drive business. My specs were not overly
rigid and I bought, rode, packed and drove about
anything with a whinny, four feet and a pulse. Good
horses made the string; the bad ones did not. In
those days, there was a slaughter market for horse
meat, so even the crankiest critter had intrinsic
value. An occasional horse was nice and usable, but
not for us, so we found them a home elsewhere. Such
the case was with Clifford.
A bruised young lady limped into my clinic one
afternoon with a gut wrenching story. She hauled her
horse up from Florida and moved in with her new
Montana boyfriend who turned out to be a graduate of
the Mike Tyson Charm School. She had had enough and
needed to sell her horse so she could afford a
one-way ticket back to the sunshine state. Contrary
to those who label all conservatives as cruel and
heartless, I bought her story and her horse and she
walked out the door with $800. Here is where it got
interesting. Her horse was a 19 hand, 2200 pound
Belgian gelding we named Clifford after a character
in a children’s book. Other than an elephant I saw
in vet school, he was the biggest animal I had ever
touched. When people first spotted Clifford they
always mouthed, “Wow,” and he was breathtaking, but
we were not sure how to use him in our string.
Trying everything, one evening I saddled up Clifford
and trotted him into the arena for a little cowboy
polo—something similar to barrel racing in a school
bus. Polo wasn’t his game. Next we hitched him to a
small two seat surrey and discovered he was easy to
drive, which was good because this was like dropping
a 1000 horsepower Pratt and Whitney engine into a
Volkswagen bug. Lastly, on our first cattle drive of
the season, we rigged a pack saddle to fit him and
stuck him in the pack string with the mules. He
wasn’t a Clydesdale and it wasn’t Budweiser, but
appropriately, he carried six, five-gallon, Coors
Light Party Balls for our guests. We sent Clifford
with the kitchen string and cooks up the Little Horn
Canyon several hours ahead of the cattle. What could
possibly go wrong?
Six miles up the canyon, is a very steep series of
switchbacks. Clifford was halfway up the
mountainside when the outside edge of the trail gave
way from the weight of his left hind foot. With
cat-like reflexes, most Quarter Horses would
athletically scramble back to solid footing.
Clifford was a Belgian. He tumbled end over end down
to the river where he lodged upside down on his back
between a log and a boulder. He wasn’t hurt, just
resting, but one Party Ball did explode spraying
beer to the tree tops. When Clifford caught his
breath, the cooks rolled him over by tugging on pack
ropes they tied to his legs. He stood up; they
repacked him and headed to camp. We packed Clifford
six times a year for three years and he never made
one trip without tumbling over at least once. He was
so big and out of his element it just wasn’t
possible for him to do the task at hand, so we found
him a new home with a former guest from the plains
of eastern Wyoming. This brings me to my point. Just
like Clifford, the federal government has grown to a
massive size and it is floundering while trying to
do things it was not designed to do. Even worse, the
federal government is attempting to do things it was
expressly prohibited from doing. Let me explain.
The framers of our Constitution enumerated the
specific powers of the federal government concluding
with the Tenth Amendment stating powers not granted
to the federal government, nor prohibited to the
states by the Constitution are reserved to the
states or the people. In case they forgot something,
our founders wrote this catch-all amendment to
purposely limit the size of the federal government
relative to the states. Obamacare, the Endangered
Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clear Air Act,
and the executive ruling on the Keystone XL
pipeline, are regulations derived from powers not
found in our Constitution. Do you see the pattern?
So, here is what we do. The federal government will
never voluntarily surrender its newly created
powers, so it is the obligation of the states,
namely the state legislatures, to force them.
Returning to a constitutional republic with a proper
vertical balance of powers won’t be easy, only worth
it. To do anything less, will collapse our great
American experiment in freedom.
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