RICHMOND, Virginia - February 4, 2011 - For a glimpse of the avant-garde in the coming battle for monetary reform, one place on which to keep an eye is Virginia, where the general assembly - the oldest legislature in the hemisphere - is considering whether the Old Dominion might establish its own currency as a hedge against the collapse of the fiat dollar now being issued by the Amerikan government.
A measure called Joint Resolution 557 has been introduced that would establish a committee “to study whether the Commonwealth should adopt a currency to serve as an alternative to the currency distributed by the Federal Reserve System in the event of a major breakdown of the Federal Reserve System.”
The new governor of the state, Robert McDonnell, has announced that he “can’t support” the legislation because the proposal violates the Constitution. McDonnell said that proposals like the one just made in Richmond stem from “fear about frightening levels of debt the federal government has taken on,” as the governor is paraphrased by the Associated Press. The newswire reports that the governor reckons that currency “is the responsibility of the federal government, not the states.”
The fact is that the Constitution does not make currency the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. It does give the federal government the power to “coin money” and regulate its value and the value of foreign coin and to fix the value of weights and measures, like the hour and the ounce. That’s in Article 1, Section 8. The Constitution does prohibit Virginia and the other states from making anything other than gold or silver coin legal tender. But it specifically leaves to the states the right to make gold or silver coin legal tender.
So out of sync with the Constitution was McDonnell’s statement that one can surmise that he misspoke. He has, after all, shown great regard in the past to the constitutional principles he is sworn to uphold; he was also attorney general before he was governor. In any event, one would have expected the governor - any governor - to defend, rather than cede in casual fashion to the federal government, the powers and privileges that are, under the Constitution, so pointedly reserved to Virginia and the other states.
