For decades you’ve seen the bumper stickers and signs: “Get US out of the UN.” Within the conservative movement, the United Nations has been a sore spot. We pay millions of dollars, billions if you count foreign aid, to nations that despise us and vote against us every chance they got.

Few people paid attention to the bumper stickers . . . until now. Although there isn’t a groundswell of sentiment to get the United States out of the United Nations, state governments are telling the organization to “get out of our state.”

It seems that the United Nations has been given access to polling stations. I just voted today. There were numerous restrictions. I couldn’t use my cell phone or any electronic device. I had to fill out a form giving my driver’s license number, home address, and identification, and I was fine with all of it.

Now we’ve got nosy UN observers pushing their way into our elections. If they are so concerned about our election process, then where were they in 2008 when the Black Panthers intimidated anti-Obama voters at a polling station outside of Philadelphia?

State officials in Iowa and Texas are blocking UN access to their polling process even though the program has been going on for at least two decades. As you can imagine, UN officials and the liberal groups sponsoring the “observers” are ticked off.
“We will of course comply,” Thomas Rymer, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, told POLITICO. “At the same time, the lack of access to polling stations for international observers in some states is not in line with the United States’s international commitments, and we have noted this in past final reports issued by observation missions.”

I am thrilled that these two states have stood up to the United States and our own Federal government. It’s about time. The states have every right to guard their jurisdictional rights. It’s written in the Constitution. It’s called the Tenth Amendment:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

In addition to the limited number of powers found in the body of the Constitution (enumerated powers), the states insisted on an added Bill of Rights that included the Tenth Amendment that extended the limited authority of the Federal government over the states. If our own national government was so limited, then you and I are assured that the United Nations has no power in the United States. It would take an amendment to give it such power.

James J. Kilpatrick is correct when he writes, “And so long as the Tenth Amendment remains a part of the Constitution, it is elementary that it must be given full meaning — that the intention of its framers must be acknowledged and respected. Plainly, the intention of the Tenth Amendment was to restrict the Federal government—to hold it within the strict boundaries of the delegated powers.”1

It’s encouraging to read that in 2008 “OSCE election observers were turned away from polling stations in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. Their poll watchers also had difficulties in counties in Colorado, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Virginia.”

1. James Jackson Kilpatrick, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (Chicago: Henry Regnery Com., 1957), 47. [↩]