For years, Richard Mack wrote books and gave speeches, arguing for gun rights, sovereign states and "constitutional sheriffs." At first, not many people listened to Mack, a two-term Graham County sheriff who lives in Safford. Many wrote him off as a radical. But that's changing. The tea party's nationwide emergence and Arizona's drift to the right are bringing Mack's ideas from the political edge into the eddies of the mainstream. Since Barack Obama's election as president, Mack, 58, has been a hot national speaker, and some of his dearest ideas have come up in the current Legislature.
A system for Arizona to "nullify" federal laws reached the floor of the state Senate before being voted down last month. Another bill would have forced federal regulators to register with the sheriff in any Arizona county where they want to work. The bill's author, Rep. Chester Crandell of Heber, said Mack inspired him. "I think the county sheriff has that power and should be protecting the rights of the people," Crandell said. "This is a way to send a message and say we are a sovereign state."This is, of course, the same scheme tea-partying legislators in Montana are attempting to pass, too. And as you can see from the above video, it all emanates from Mack's ceaseless promotion of the radical right's extremist localism -- the belief that the sheriff, and not the federal government, represent the supreme law of the land.
Mack certainly didn't invent this system. Rather, it was first promoted back in the 1960s and '70s by the old Posse Comitatus movement, which contended that "there is no legitimate form of government above that of the county level and no higher law authority than the county sheriff. If the sheriff refuses to carry out the will of the county's citizens:"
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/longtime-far-right-patriots-moving-m
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