Interstate Compacts represent one [of six] important strategies available to Texas, in order to effectively redress the Federal Government’s overreach into areas properly reserved to the States. The strategies should enable us to reclaim the Constitution and to halt transformation now underway from a constitutional federal Republic to that of a consolidated national democratic welfare state.
Interstate compacts are an effective way to regulate areas of mutual concern among two or more states, such as health care reform. The Supreme Court has held that congressional consent to such compacts trumps prior federal law and may even subordinate federal agencies to the agencies created by the interstate compact. Congressional consent does not necessarily require presidential signature. The Supreme Court has also suggested that congressional consent may be inferred from acquiescence. Interstate compacts thus have enormous unexplored potential as a way of shielding areas of state authority from the concentration of power in Washington, and we ought to have an interstate compact to create an alternative state-based regulation of health care (to replace ObamaCare).
The other five strategies which the State must pursue are: 1) Constitutional amendment to balance the budget; 2) opting out of federal programs and federal funds that have strings attached; 3) federal lawsuits (especially aimed at ObamaCare and the EPA to seek relief from environmental actions); 4) federal legislation (amending the Administrative Procedures Act so the Supremacy Clause shall not apply to mere regulatory action against state law, as well as modifying rules of decision for federal courts to give the Tenth Amendment precedence and presumption), and, finally; selectively applied, 5) the doctrine of nullification or state interposition described by Madison and Jefferson in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves.