Ted Nugent, a.k.a. the Motor City Madman, penned a column for the Washington Times on Thursday saying he wonders if – given what he sees as a continued expansion of federal authority – the nation wouldn’t have been better off if the Confederacy had won the Civil War.
Not surprisingly, Nugent – a firearms enthusiast, conservative and guitar rocker best known for hits such as “Cat Scratch Fever” – took aim at the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision upholding the insurance mandate in the 2010 health care law and what he called Chief Justice John Roberts’ “traitor vote” siding with the court’s more liberal wing.
Nugent said the court’s decision “will ensure more monumental spending and wasted taxes …under one of the world’s most bureaucratic, ineffective, incompetent and grossly expensive systems ever devided by man: our out-of-control federal government.”
He goes onto write:
“Because our legislative, judicial and executive branches of government hold the 10th Amendment in contempt, I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War. Our Founding Fathers’ concept of limited government is dead.”
The 10th amendment provides that powers not expressly delegated to the U.S. government by the constitution or prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states or the people. Nugent doesn’t explain the remark in his column, but states’ rights were a rallying cry for the supporters of the Confederacy who believed a central government under President Abraham Lincoln would move to end slavery.