AFP
By Pat Shannan

Sheriffs from all over America are being invited to gather on Jan. 30, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada, for what could be the most important meeting “since the Constitutional Convention of 1787,” according to Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA) founder Richard Mack.

AFP recently spoke with Mack by cell phone as he zigzagged by car across Florida as a guest speaker for various groups.

As Americans push back with their tea party and occupy movements, screaming at the corruption of big banks and Wall Street, they still have not realized the rudimentary solution right in their own backyards, says CSPOA.

Mack is the former sheriff of Graham County, Ariz. who took the federal government under President Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court in the 1990s in a “David vs. Goliath” struggle that he won. His efforts stopped the Brady Bill from forcing all county sheriffs to do federal paperwork and conduct background checks on gun buyers. Now he is taking another giant step to educate some 2,000 county sheriffs across the nation who have been so numbed with bureaucratic propaganda many don’t even remember the meaning of their oaths of office or the rulebook they swore to follow.

“Your local sheriff needs to know,” Mack told AFP, “that there is nothing that the UN or the New World Order boys or the feds want to shove down our otherwise healthy throats that we cannot stop at the county level with a constitutionally educated sheriff.”

The goal, according to Mack, is to get 10 percent of all the sheriffs, or about 200, from around the nation on board for a free education. He figures that when 200 of them begin to behave constitutionally by telling federal agents not to step beyond their county boundaries and taking positive action to prevent it, much of the remaining majority will wake up.

Here is CSPOA’s plan: raise $200,000 to bring 200 county sheriffs to the Nevada conference at an average cost of $1,000 each. This may not be as high a mountain to scale as it sounds because many citizens are so anxious for their sheriffs to attend, they already have taken it upon themselves to send them. This has greatly lightened CSPOA’s load.

We are told that security will be tight and no employees from any federal agency will be allowed inside the meeting room. Anyone not endorsed and accompanied by a visiting sheriff will be turned away. However, any private citizen who wishes to pay $1,000 may sit in, as the money will be used to fund the expenses of another out-of-state sheriff.

“We have collected nearly $50,000 and need only $100,000 more because of the commitment of various county citizens who strongly want their sheriff to be there and are willing to raise the money locally,” said Mack. “This is what we need a few more counties to do.”

Raising only $1,000 for the good of one’s county is far easier than Mack’s effort of trying to raise $200,000 on his own, but he hasn’t slowed down.

There are 17 active sheriffs from 14 different states who sit on the board of directors of CSPOA, and many of them have admitted that they did not live up to their oaths of office until recently because they simply didn’t know any better. Many are angry and repentant.

Some who would be there cannot—such as former sheriff Melvin Holly of Latimer County, Okla. He is incarcerated in federal prison. Holly’s crime: He attempted to stop a drug-running operation in his county that was apparently federally sanctioned. His error? He didn’t stop investigating and ended up framed for multiple sex crimes he says never happened. Holly was then convicted after witnesses reportedly received payoffs for their deceitful testimony.

It is a growing problem that all sheriffs face because of the Fed’s ability to create unconstitutional money and the feds’ ability to pass  unconstitutional statutes legalizing payoffs to witnesses in the event of a conviction. But almost no lawyers, let alone sheriffs, even knew that these statutes existed before AFP’s story alerted them last year. See AFP’s Aug. 16, 2010 edition (#33) for that article.

“The bottom line is that county sheriffs need to know that their power exceeds that of federal interlopers,” pointed out Mack. “Ultimately, he is the one who will decide what is and what is not enforced in the county. He has the authority and an oath-bound duty to interpose himself on the citizen’s behalf to protect you from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. But a large majority of these 2,000 sheriffs just don’t know it.”

Georgians got a dose of this power on Dec. 1 when Fulton County (Atlanta) sheriff’s deputies defied a court by refusing to evict bedridden Vita Lee, 104, and her 83- year-old daughter from their home of 53 years.

“We are not in trouble in this country because we follow the Constitution too closely,” Mack told AFP. “Just the opposite. But there is a way to get back to it, sheriff by sheriff, county by county.”

See www.cspoa.org for information on how you can help.