Debra Medina, the Tea Party activist and candidate in the Texas Republican gubernatorial primary who has attracted attention for her favorable comments about 9/11 Truthers and Birthers, is also involved with another extreme ideological movement: The Oath Keepers.
Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News points out that Medina will appear this Sunday at an event in San Antonio, called “Taking Back Texas.” The other two top-billed speakers are Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers movement, and Oather activist Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona.
The Oath Keepers, as detailed on their Web site, are a group that calls upon active and veteran members of the military, police and firefighters to take an oath that they will not obey any order they deem unconstitutional. The list of unconstitutional orders include enforcement of gun laws, detention of American citizens as enemy combatants, and impositions upon state sovereignty. The latter trends into areas of nullification — an early 1800’s ideological predecessor of secession, arguing that a state can unilaterally refuse to recognize a law of the federal government: “We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty and declares the national government to be in violation of the compact by which that state entered the Union.”
