With a faltering economy, multiple wars, and the approaching demise of the dollar’s reserve status, there are more than enough problems to keep politicians in Washington working day and night. In between handing out cash for clunkers and nationalizing healthcare, the administration is busy sending more troops overseas, escalating existing wars, and seeking out excuses to start new wars. Congress is working on “urgent” legislation to address crises like healthcare reform and climate change.

The reforms are so very urgent that legislation must pass swiftly with no time to read the bills even though the new laws wouldn’t take effect for several years! Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is busy dealing with our dollar crisis by printing up more dollars.

Yes, there certainly is a lot for Washington to do these days. Most, if not all, of what Washington is doing however, is more of what created the problems in the first place. Capitol Hill is filled with politicians running around putting out fires – but with gasoline. The truth is that all these fires keep so many powerful people employed and wealthy that it is not truly in many decision makers’ interests to be very effective problem-solvers.

If Washington ran out of problems, think how many lobbyists would be out of a job, and how many special interest groups would just disband? Sadly, whatever is bad for the greater economy is good for the economy and job market in DC.

Of course, no form of government, not even one that respected its Constitutional restraints, would magically create a problem-free society. The question is: how should a society deal with its problems? The form of government that our founders envisioned, in which the federal government was strictly constrained by the Constitution, allows private citizens and communities to solve their own problems.

The role of the government should be to protect contracts, punish fraud and violence through appropriate laws, law enforcement and the courts. Not a whole lot of laws or bureaucrats are really necessary to work on just that. Instead, new laws are constantly needed to fix the problems that previous unconstitutional laws created.

We have ended up with an incomprehensible maze of laws and regulations that severely constrains the people and expands the government – the exact opposite of what our founders intended.

This is all because the Constitution is treated like a suggestion manual instead of the supreme law of the land. Under the Constitution, politicians’ hands are supposed to be tied in most of the areas they involve themselves in today. But somewhere along the line, politicians stepped out of Constitutional bounds and started pretending to solve our problems for us.

All we have to show for it is more problems.

Today, Washington politicians can busily “solve” one problem, knowing that unintended consequences from that “solution” will keep them and their friends all very busy tomorrow. The people are ultimately left suffocating under the burden of Washington’s helping hands. It is coming to a point where our economy, our dollar, and indeed, the rest of the world have had about all the help from Washington that they can stand.

The United States is headed the way of Rome and the Soviet Union, for the same reasons, unless we reverse the trend.

I continue to hope that enough Americans will realize that the true strength of our country doesn’t come from Washington, but rather the limitations placed on government in the Constitution. We must resolve to reverse the destructive course that we are on and then never again let big government problem-solving take over our lives and our country.

Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas

As I learned when recently delivering a lecture, the 10th Amendment is getting a lot of attention. Tenthers — those believing the federal government’s authority should be strictly limited to the enumerated powers in the Constitution — are passionate. Their opponents are equally passionate.

One person asked me if Tenthers’ argument had any constitutional legitimacy. My answer was, well, yes.

The 10th Amendment simply states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Since 1789, the major political question has been concerning the paradox of dual sovereignty: To what extent shall we be national and to what extent shall we be federal? To what extent shall the United States government be sovereign and to what extent shall a state be sovereign?

Historically, the 10th Amendment has been used to preserve regional particularism and resist centralization. During the 1850s, some Northerners used the 10th Amendment as a justification to ignore the Fugitive Slave Law, and after Lincoln was elected, some Southerners used it as an excuse to preserve slavery.

During the Civil War, some northern governors invoked it to resist Lincoln’s centralizing tendencies, while some Confederate governors, including North Carolina’s Zeb Vance and Georgia’s Joe Brown, used states’ rights arguments to resist Jefferson Davis’ policies, including conscription.

A lot of contemporary liberals don’t have much sympathy for the 10th Amendment, however. “This argument has been used to stop progress, and to not keep hope alive,” said commentator Alan Colmes. “If the tenthers had their way, there would be no Medicare, no Social Security, even no public education. How about Every Child Left Behind”

What a simplification!

The 10th Amendment does not prevent states from having public education or creating welfare systems — to name two examples. In fact, North Carolina had public schools during the antebellum era.

Although it has problems, TennCare, a government-operated medical assistance program, has existed in the Volunteer State since 1994. Again, the argument is whether such programs should be created or heavily controlled and directed by the national government.

Invoking 10th Amendment concerns about sovereignty is nothing new.

In 1788, North Carolina balked over ratifying the Constitution and relinquishing more of its power to a centralized government. It remained out of the Union for a year, and in many ways, acted as a quasi-nation.

In 1818, the Tar Heel State levied a tax on out-of-state banks doing business in North Carolina, and charged each branch $5,000. The state snubbed its nose at a national bank: The Bank of the United States.

In a truly federal government, regional particularism lives. Sometimes it can be ugly and immoral. Other times it showcases genuine progress. Sometimes the argument “It’s just the way things are done here” is good enough for me; everyone doesn’t have to think like me.

In a truly federal government, Massachusetts could allow same-sex marriages and bar the Ten Commandments from public displays. In a truly federal government, Alabama could display the Ten Commandments in state courtrooms and outlaw same-sex marriages.

Until State of Missouri v. Holland (1920), migratory bird hunting was regulated at the state level, and in a truly federal government, it would be so today. In a truly federal government, states would make laws concerning abortion, health care, and many other issues.

And in a truly federal government, these states would continue to trade with each other and join forces in times of national emergency.

As government becomes more centralized, and states relinquish authority, the powerful redouble their efforts to make others act (and believe) like them.

Originally published in CarolinaJournal.com – reposted here with permission of the author.

Troy Kickler [send him email] has been Director of the North Carolina History Project since August 2005. He holds an M.S. in Social Studies Education from North Carolina A&T State University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Tennessee. His specialty areas are nineteenth-century U.S., Civil War and Reconstruction, African American, and religious history.

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This year, hundreds of thousands of citizens have met in Tea Party rallies across our nation and have given a voice to the Jeffersonian tradition. The crowds support the reduction of federal power and an end to undisciplined government spending. This approach to government is the philosophy advocated by our third president, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was one of the early proponents of the “strict constructionist” view of the Constitution. This view affirms that any powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited to the states, should be reserved to the states and to the people. This is the essence of the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was part of the Constitution Jefferson swore to uphold in his oath of office.

Jefferson defended the rights of the common man over the prerogatives of the state. His view on the subject is stated succinctly in a letter to Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the U.S. Constitution and one-time governor of Massachusetts. The letter was dated 1799, a year before Jefferson was elected president.

“I am for preserving to the States the powers not yielded by them to the Union, & to the legislature of the Union [Congress], its constitutional share in the division of powers; and I am not for transferring all the powers of the States to the general government, & all those of that government to the Executive branch.”

In his first Inaugural Address, Jefferson also touched on this subject when he listed his “essential principles of our government.”

“…the support of the state governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies…”

Jefferson would start another revolution were he alive today, for what he opposed occurred in the twentieth century. The federal government assumed more and more authority in every area of government policy, from building roads to educating children. Jefferson would have left these matters to be handled at the state level; he would not have enlarged the federal government to administer them in Washington.

Executive branch departments and so-called independent agencies control the program delivery systems and administrative rule-making powers that define federal policy today. Meanwhile, state officials must go to Washington, D.C. and beg for federal money and federal programs.

The states should tell the Feds to keep their programs and their money, but that would be difficult politically and financially. States would have to raise state and local taxes to make up for the loss in federal funds and the federal government would lose control over the states and the populace.

Of course, this would mean the federal budget could be balanced and the national debt retired, over time. This is the program of reform that Congress would enact if it really wanted to serve the people and carefully steward the taxpayers’ money.

Jefferson’s strict constructionist view put him at odds with Alexander Hamilton, who advocated the opposing doctrine of implied powers, which gave the federal government a much more expansive field of authority.

Jefferson and Hamilton were both members of the Cabinet during George Washington’s presidency. The two men sharply disagreed over the question of public debt. Hamilton saw it as a positive tool that could be used to establish credit for the United States, while Jefferson saw public debt as an affront to the liberty of the citizens.

Hamilton believed a national debt to be a blessing. Jefferson, however, was of a different mind. He wrote to James Madison in 1789 regarding the nation of France, “. . . would it not be wise and just for that nation to declare in the constitution they are forming that neither the legislature, nor the nation itself can validly contract more than they may pay within their own age, or within the term of 19 years?”

In his 1799 letter to Elbridge Gerry, Jefferson commented on frugal government and eliminating public debt.

“I am for a government rigorously frugal & simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers & salaries merely to make partisans, & for increasing, by every device, the public debt, on the principle of its being a public blessing.”

In getting Congress to accept all Revolutionary War debts at face value, Hamilton obligated the government to pay for years on the principal and interest. In order to make payments on the debt, several new taxes were necessary. These taxes included tariffs or import duties and excise taxes on such things as alcohol, refined sugars, auctions, and licenses. Once in office, Jefferson and his allies in the Congress worked to repeal the excise taxes.

During his presidency, Congress, at Jefferson’s request, abolished the internal revenue service, which had been established to collect the excise taxes. This branch of the Treasury Department should not be confused with the modern Internal Revenue Service.

The agency in Jefferson’s day consisted of about five hundred employees who were involved in collecting excise taxes. (The income tax had not yet been established.) With the excise taxes repealed, there was no need for this tax-collecting agency. Jefferson and his Treasury secretary also persuaded Congress to cut government spending and make substantial payments to reduce the war debt.

According to Americans for Prosperity, a free-market advocacy organization, our government has already spent trillions in its attempt to solve our economic problems. This is more than the cost of World War II. In addition, the government has committed to spend trillions more over the next few years, which will bring the grand total to an unbelievable $11.6 trillion in new spending – more than 26 times the size of the New Deal.

It is time for citizens to engage their public servants and demand a stop to this madness. It is time for the Washington liberals to wake up and do what common sense demands. Fiscal responsibility is a big key to solving our problems. Now is the time to make the changes that will re-establish American liberty.

Jim Jess has participated in politics as an activist, writer, and nonprofit organization leader for 30 years. He worked in the office of Governor Sonny Perdue and is a member of several conservative groups. Jim writes for Examiner.com and maintans the website ConstitutionalEducation.org.

Speech before the State House supporting passage of HCR-69

Prior to the Tea Party demonstrations across our nation I have not heard of a ‘Tea Party’ since grammar school and the last one held in the U.S. was well over 200 years ago.

Resolution HCR 69 and the Tea Parties seen this past April around the state and nation could actually go hand in hand.  In different, but similar ways both address our federal governments excessive federal spending, an increasingly burdensome tax code, as well as meddling into our personal and professional lives at unprecedented levels.  For many Mississippians they’ve had enough and they are looking to us for a solution.

Simply stated this Resolution is about the 10th amendment to the US Constitution where it states –

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Congress’s most important role granted by the constitution is to protect the rights and safety of its people, most notably by providing national security.  However, they have interpreted their responsibility well beyond the intent of our founding fathers and find themselves treading deep into the powers granted to this legislative body.  They seem to be making it up as they go.

Some in our very own Congressional delegation has tried to limit the size of government, but they need our help because it is now out of control.

The federal government is growing unchecked as seen by this current administrations actions as well as prior administrations.  As a country we are governed by a written constitution that grants the people and the states the right to keep government in line and that we cannot be forced to accept an oppressive and intrusive federal government.

The Constitution was well designed, and checks and balances are in place to prevent this through the various amendments, but if they are not adhered to and enforced then the Constitution is dead.

Resolutions of this nature are currently being considered in over 30 states and many are garnering strong bi-partisan support. Some have passed and others will be passed.

Mississippi’s resolution was drafted with the aid of my colleagues in the house and our legal counsel.  It was designed to reflect the diverse nature of this membership and not to be inflammatory or too demanding.  This resolution is designed to reinforce the principle of limited government that protects us from an ever expanding federal government.

We have seen the federal government continuing to encroach into our every day lives from dictating how we teach or children, funding federal initiatives that many believe to be immoral, over regulating and taxing our citizenry, meddling in our personal lives and interfering with the affairs of our State.

Mississippians and our fellow Americans have made it very clear on April 15th that we are not willing to let our government dictate every aspect of their lives from a fact made very clear by the thousands who turned out to protest the government.

The federal government has proven, time and time again, they can’t manage their own affairs so why we would we let them manage our companies, our schools, our businesses and our families.

I’m asking this House on behalf of many Mississippians to reaffirm our rights as a sovereign and unique state to prevent the federal government from continuing to grow unchecked and illegally assuming powers reserved by the Mississippi legislature.

Let us pass this resolution, send to the Senate for concurrence and then send a clear message to Congress and the President.

Steven Palazzo is a member of the Mississippi State House of Representatives.  He was first elected in 2007.  You can contact him here.

That really is the question.

To increase the one, you have to limit the other. There’s no two ways about it.

If confronted with that choice, which one will you increase??

Naturally, there is only one sane answer. Yet, good, well-meaning, but horribly deceived and misled Americans are constantly choosing government over freedom and prosperity by their daily actions, behaviors – and voting patterns.
Why?

The reason is that nobody is being told that this is what the choice boils down to. The big – and going – lie from the government/corporate establishment is: “Hey, vote for us, and we’ll get you freedom and prosperity, too … uhh, … eventually, at least … I think!”

It’s the siren song of modern politics, and we are taking it all in as if it was a beautiful symphony. We smoked the establishment’s crack and believe we can fly as we jump out of a twntieth-floor window.

All that needs to happen for Americans to find their way again is to make it very clear to them that these two are incompatible. If you increase one, you MUST and WILL limit the other.

Proof:

Freedom has never suffered more than during times when government power increased the most. Bush’s legacy is that he literally gutted Lady Liberty, more than any other president in US history, (short of maybe Lincoln, FDR, and Nixon), to the point at which she almost expired.

Her last hope is not Obama, it’s YOU.

Obama will absolutely not give up the power Bush has stolen and bequeathed to him; he will only wear a nicer smile as he cuts her heart out as well.

What will you do?

Will you finally take the shackles off of Lady Liberty and put them on your government, or will you stand by as she finally bleeds to death while she lies handcuffed on the floor, holding her spilling bowels in her hands?

The choice – as always – is yours.

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all. – Jacob Hornberger.

Every four years, voters in the United States are given a choice between two major party candidates in the Presidential election.  We are often told that either of these candidates are the “mainstream” candidates and if you want your vote to count, you need to choose between either one of the two major party candidates who have a “chance” at “winning”.

However, for true supporters of limited government and personal liberty, this is often a choice made in vain.  If you truly believe in a limited, decentralized government which protects both economic and personal liberties and rights, during most elections there isn’t a major party candidate that will generally fit your values.  You have a choice between the Democratic Party, of which too many members wish to violate your economic rights and liberties, and the Republican Party, of which too many members wish to violate your personal rights and liberties.  This is not a judgment of individuals in either party.  Most individual members are doing what they think is right.  This is a judgment on those than run the major parties.

To illustrate my own philosophy of government, I’ve often used an analogy of a road trip.  The route and destination are analogous to the choices you make in life and the level of freedom you possess.

Too many big government Democrats want to drive your car for you.  They feel that if they know the route better, it’s in your own interest to just sit in the back and let them drive the car for you — they will be able to plan the best route and will be able to get to the destination according to the way they think is best.  It doesn’t matter if you feel that a different route may be better, because they know how to get there better than you do.

Unfortunately for the American people, some Republicans have deviated from the principles that the party was founded upon, limited government and personal responsibility.  Therefore, there is also a part of the Republican Party, a segment of big government Republicans that also want to choose the route and destination for you.  Rather than driving the vehicle for you, they will let you sit in the drivers seat and give you the illusion that you are making free choices when in reality the government is in the passenger seat next to you with it’s own set of omnipotent pedals and a steering wheel that they can use to override any choice they deem as unacceptable.  Like the omnipotent Drivers Ed teacher than can take control of the vehicle at any moment, big government Republicans want you to have the illusion that you are making your own choices but in reality are only holding up a smokescreen.  If they don’t like your choice, they can (and will) quickly override you.  The only difference between big government Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans want to give you an illusion that you will be able to choose your destination, when in fact the level of control is the same.  Pro-corporate bailout Republicans fit into this category, and it hurts good Republicans like Jeff Flake and Ron Paul.

Those who advocate limited government offer a different path.  Grover Norquist wrote that, “The Leave Us Alone Coalition [Norquist's name for limited government advocates] is not antigovernment.  It simply wants properly limited government that plays a role in protecting the life, liberty and property of citizens.”

The proper role of government is not to shepherd you to the “correct” decision, government’s role is to protect your rights so that you may make your own choices, whether popular or not, good or bad.  Therefore, in the context of the above analogy, to an advocate for limited government, the government is not in your car at all.  No judgments can be made on either your route or destination because government is not a participant in the road trip.  Instead, government is the mechanic, keeping your car running so that you can make your own decisions while driving.

The proper role of government is not to make sure people make good decisions.  There is no role for personal morals in government.  The real purpose of government is to maintain minimum social order for people to live their lives by their own morals through their own choices. The key word in that sentence is minimum.  For too long, authoritarians have used the guise of “social order” to induce massive control and individual rights violations.  To protect minimum social order, government exists to protect nothing more than individual rights, with individual rights being defined broadly enough to include the right to do anything until you restrict the freedom of someone else to do what they please — the classic example being that you have the right to swing your fists through the air, but the right to swing your fist ends at the tip of another person’s nose.  This self-correcting view of rights is the only way to ensure freedom.  Some may even question whether government is the proper avenue for the protection of rights.  Throughout history, it is rare to find an institution that has as evil a record on protecting rights as government does.  However, while government may be a bad mechanism for protecting rights, it’s probably least bad way we have, and certainly the only demonstrable way.  Barry Goldwater illustrated this point when he stated in his classic Conscience of a Conservative, “All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of ’security.’  We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system.  We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if ‘the people’ rule, all is well.”

However, the deference to government power is moving us from the individualistic “Father knows best” mentality to our current way, a “government knows best” mentality where Barack Obama and his band of merry travelers will dictate economic planning from above because they know best.  This is the same type of argument that Justice Holmes gives in allowing the power of government to dictate what’s best in the 1927 decision Buck v. Bell in which Holmes reasoned that government could dictate solutions to social problems.  By reasoning that it was within the power of government to forcibly sterilize the “feeble minded and socially inadequate,”  Holmes’ reasons for why the government could sterilize women against their will and the reasons behind the entire platform of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign are identical:  government knows best, and government will attempt to solve social problems.  If there is one lesson to take from history, it’s that deference to government knowledge and planning is dangerous and responsible for most of the suffering in the world.

However, under no objective analysis have the Republicans done any better.  Too many Republicans have given in to the demands of big government is an effort to hold on to power.  The Republican Party is not in the gutter because they have been too laissez-faire.  The Republican Party is in the gutter because the status quo of the GOP has thrown the principles of limited government into the trash. Discretionary domestic spending under George W. Bush rose at a higher rate than it did under Bill Clinton.  The legacy of George W. Bush will be as the Great Spender and the Great Regulator.  If you are proud of the record of the GOP in the last eight years, you are not an advocate for limited government.  If you are proud of the record of the GOP in the last eight years, you are a supporter of big government.

The main problem for this stems from the fact that when presented with a big government Republican, advocates for limited government are often pressured to support the big government Republican in the name of ‘victory.’  Unfortunately, I see no ‘victory’ in creeping socialism, despite whether there is an R or a D next to the name.  Republicans who supported candidates like John McCain and other politicians who voted for the bailout seem to welcome socialism, as long as there is an R next to the candidate’s name.  Instead of standing up for the principles of limited government, these Republican socialists have tossed aside what’s right and many have become no better than Democrats.

Under President Bush, this Republican administration has left a legacy of big government.  Among the legacies of the Bush administration

• When President Bush took office, the national debt was approximately $5 trillion dollars.  As he leaves office, the national debt is currently over $10 trillion dollars.  President Bush has doubled the national debt in eight years.
• President Bush has made it his policy that the federal government should micromanage who should and who shouldn’t get married.  The federal government must approve of your relationship before you can wed.
• President Bush spearheaded the federalization of education in 2001.  President Bush has decided that unelected bureaucrats in Washington should control your child’s education, not parents and teachers.

This is only a select portion of the harm that runaway government power under George W. Bush has threatened our nation and way of life.  Big government was slipped in by Republicans because no one was minding the store.  Many of the largest budget items weren’t even included in budgets, because they were so outrageous that they wouldn’t survive budget negotiations.  They could be added later with a sense of urgency because of “emergency” purposes.  According to Grover Norquist:

“The Bush administration has perfected the strategy of pretending to send up a budget and then showing up later with ‘emergency’ spending requests to pay for such ‘unexpected’ costs as pay and equipment for the hundred thousand American troops in Iraq that have been there for years, but somehow the guys at OMB forgot this when they wrote their budget”

The fiscal policies of the Bush administration while running interference on budget supplementals would make Senator Goldwater roll over in his grave.  In the end, there is really no difference between the “Compassionate Conservatism” of President Bush and the Great Society socialism of President Johnson.  Both are big spending, big government social programs designed to treat the “symptoms” of poverty and not the actual “disease” of poverty.

Henry Hazlitt understood these problems when he wrote the free market classic Economics in One Lesson.  The central thesis of the book is that economic planning by government will always attempt to benefit one group (whichever group is lobbying for a policy enactment) at the expense of all other groups, and will always help in the short term while being harmful in the long run.  Therefore, he states that, “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”  When government tries to meet the need of whatever group has power or money at any given time, the results are almost universally bad.  Hazlitt states,

“Each one of us, in brief, has a multiple economic personality.  Each one of us is producer, taxpayer, consumer.  The policies he advocates depend upon the particular aspect under which he thinks of himself at the moment.  For he is sometimes Dr. Jekyll and sometimes Mr. Hyde.  As a producer he wants inflation (thinking chiefly of his own services or product); as a consumer he wants price ceilings (thinking chiefly of what he has to pay for the products of others).  As a consumer he may advocate or acquiesce in subsidies; as a taxpayer he will resent paying them.  Each person is likely to thinking that he can so manage the political forces that he can benefit from a rise for his own product (while his raw material costs are legally held down) and at the same time benefit as a consumer from price control.  But the overwhelming majority will be deceiving themselves.  For not only must there be at least as much loss as gain from this political manipulation of prices; there must be a great deal more loss than gain, because price fixing discourages and disrupts employment and production”

Because we have many different roles in our economy, any policies which are enacted for your benefit as one role will harm you in your other roles.  The only way to keep everything is free market capitalism.  Enterprise capitalism is the only way to ensure justice among all the roles within a diverse economy, strictly because it avoids the problems of central economic planning expressed so eloquently by Hazlitt above.

This all leads back to the fact that the powers that be in both the Democratic and Republican Parties have ignored two of the most important parts of the Bill of Rights:  the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

The Ninth Amendment states:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In layman’s terms, this means that just because some rights are specifically mentioned in the Constitution, naming those rights should not be taken to mean that rights that are not mentioned are not protected.  Put simply, the list of rights in the Constitution is not exhaustive or complete; there are other rights held by the people which are not named, because it would be impossible to name every single right retained by the people.  Leading Ninth Amendment scholar and law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center (and native of my home town/graduate of my high school alma mater) Randy Barnett has this to say about the Ninth Amendment and the protection of rights, from his book Restoring the Lost Constitution:  The Presumption of Liberty (p. 58)

…natural rights define a private domain within which persons may do as they please, provided their conduct does not encroach upon the rightful domain of others.  As long as their actions remain within this rightful domain, other persons — including persons calling themselves government officials — should not interfere without a compelling justification.  Because people have a right to do whatever they please within the boundaries defined by natural rights, this means that the rights retained by the people are limited only by their imagination and could never be completely specified or enumerated.

There is no better paragraph on the meaning and bounds of natural rights of which I am aware.  The Ninth Amendment is not a source of any specific rights per se, it’s a guideline that ensures that just because a right isn’t mention doesn’t mean it isn’t held by the people.

Next up is the Tenth Amendment.  It states:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

This is probably the most ignored part of the entire Constitution.  The meaning has been lost to many currently in power, yet is so simple:  the federal government only has the power it is specifically given in the Constitution.  Unless the Constitution gives the federal government the power to do something, it doesn’t have that power.  This system was set up by the founders precisely to give autonomy to the state and local governments, with minimal power to the federal government.  The federal government serves an important purpose, and that’s why powers are delegated to the federal government in the Constitution.  However, the power that was delegated to the federal government was minimal.  Current politicians have chosen to completely ignore this amendment, and give a completely illiterate reading of the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution.

The ninth and tenth amendments work hand in hand.  The ninth amendment gives an expansive view of individual rights, and the tenth amendment institutes a strong limitation on the powers of the federal government.  It seems that too many Republicans want to ignore the expansive view of natural rights in the ninth amendment and Democrats want to ignore the strict limits on the power of the federal government of the tenth amendment.

The most principled person in Washington understands this problem.  Back in 1998, Ron Paul wrote,

“But rather than abide by our constitutional limits, Congress recently passed two pieces of legislation – neither containing a shred of constitutional authority – which, of course, were “non-controversial” despite moving us further from the notion of a limited government. One piece of legislation pledged that the Congress will “pass legislation that provides the weapons and tools necessary to protect our children and our communities from the dangers of drug addiction and violence.” Setting aside for the moment the practicality of federal prohibition laws, an experiment which failed miserably with alcohol in the 1920s, the threshold question must be: “under what authority do we act?” Whether any governmental entity should be protecting individuals from themselves and their own stupidity is certainly debatable; whether the federal government is constitutionally empowered to do so is not. Being stupid or brilliant to one’s sole disadvantage or advantage, respectively, is exactly what liberty is all about.”

Unfortunately, not enough people have read the Constitution.

It is for these reasons that I call on advocates for limited government to pledge to support the World’s Smallest Political Platform.  It reads that we “support reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.”

There are good organizations out there that believe in limited government.  Some good ones to support are (There are many, many more good limited government organizations.  This is just an example):
Heartland Institute
Americans for Tax Reform
Illinois Policy Institute
Cato Institute
Republican Liberty Caucus

I leave you with a quote from Mr. Republican himself, Robert Taft.  If we had more Robert Tafts in the Republican Party, we’d be much better off.

I mean liberty of the individual to think his own thoughts and live his own life as he desires to think and to live; the liberty of the family to decide how they wish to live, what they want to eat for breakfast and for dinner, and how they wish to spend their time; liberty of a man to develop his ideas and get other people to teach those ideas, if he can convince them that they have some value to the world; liberty of every local community to decide how its children shall be educated, how its local services shall be run, and who its local leaders shall be; liberty of a man to choose his own occupation; and liberty of a man to run his own business as he thinks it ought to be run, as long as he does not interfere with the right of other people to do the same thing. – Robert Taft

Jeff Wartman [send him email] is an activist for limited and local government in Will County, Illinois.  He is fighting to restore the principles of limited government, liberty and competitiveness to the people.  Visit his website at http://jeffwartman.com.

The federal government was supposed to be limited to a few defined powers. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution- “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” -confirms it.

The federal government, of course, does not at present respect its constitutional limits. The chief culprit, in this regard, is the massive social legislation and regulatory apparatus enacted under Congress’s constitutional authority “to regulate Commerce . . . among the several states” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3).

That clause, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, has been the source of constitutional authority for the great expansion of federal control over health, morals, education, crime, labor, environmental conditions, and retirement and unemployment insurance programs. For example, provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing racial discrimination by private individuals were upheld as a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the interstate commerce clause. In Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), the Court held that racial discrimination, in the form of refusal to serve blacks at privately owned restaurants, imposed burdens on interstate commerce that Congress could seek to eliminate.

The Court took this tack because the Constitution does not grant Congress a general police power to legislate in the realm of public morals. That is, Congress has no authority to pass such a law simply on the basis that racial discrimination is a moral abomination, or even on grounds that the institutionalized treatment of a racial class as subhuman is apt to result in social upheaval, riot, or other breaches of the public peace. Yet let it be found, or reasonably suspected, that this discrimination impedes commerce, why then (but only then!) Congress may act. Apparently, the Court would have us believe that the Founders granted the federal government authority to enact all manner of social legislation—provided only that it is good for business.

An analysis this cynical ought to suggest that the Court’s “interpretation” of the commerce clause is an expedient fabrication and that the clause was never meant to serve as backdoor authority for social legislation. No such luck.

The New Deal

The commerce clause became the carte blanche for social legislation through a series of cases upholding New Deal legislation in the 1930s and 1940s. In those cases the Supreme Court interpreted the clause as permitting Congress not just to regulate commerce (actual interstate trade in goods and services), but also to regulate anything that had a “substantial effect” on commerce. The watershed case which held that Congress could regulate purely private, individual, and noncommercial conduct was Wickard v. Filburn (1942).

In its simplest terms, Wickard held that Congress had authority under the interstate commerce clause to prohibit Filburn, the owner of a small farm, from growing, storing, and consuming his very own wheat on his very own property. For this reason, it is often selected by libertarians (and occasionally conservatives) as a patent illustration not only of the Supreme Court’s egregious failure to uphold the Constitution, but also of the now nearly unlimited scope of congressional power.

Yet a close reading of the case redirects attention away from the Supreme Court as the villain responsible for the loss of limited government, and reveals more precisely the reason for that loss. More troubling still, a close analysis of Wickard indicates why term limits, balanced budgets, prohibitions on unfunded mandates, or similar institutional devices will not re-establish limited government, and points to the daunting nature and magnitude of the reform necessary to limit government power.

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George Bush, basically unchallenged by Congress in his calamitous war in Iraq, can thank several of his Republican predecessors for his imperial power.

Out of power for some 20 years in the early 1950s, many Republicans had been critics of the secretive foreign policy of Democratic presidents in the 1930s and 1940s. These were the Republicans who supported the Bricker amendment, which aimed to rein in the power of presidents.

The Bricker amendment’s intent was at least twofold.

First, it would prevent presidential executive agreements from undermining the powers of the states as detailed in the Tenth Amendment. Since the Supreme Court had held that treaties, which require the approval of the Senate, override Tenth Amendment provisions, critics feared that executive agreements, which would be issued by imperial presidents without Senate consent, would constitute an even graver assault on the Tenth Amendment.

More broadly, Bricker advocates warned that imperial presidents could make agreements that pushed the nation into war situations without bringing those many agreements before a Senate treaty-review process.

The Bricker amendment in its various incarnations was actually a collection of proposed amendments to the Constitution that not only would have prohibited treaties that conflicted with the Constitution but also would have restricted the ability of presidents to enter into executive agreements. Executive agreements are used by imperial presidents to bypass the often messy advise-and-consent, treaty-review process.

The amendment was originally offered and generally backed by Republicans who were upset by Franklin Roosevelt’s and Harry Truman’s foreign policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Decades later, when it was Republican presidents who seemed to ignore Congress’s powers, many Republicans would forget that it was their party that had proposed the Bricker amendment.

Indeed, a major political party out of power will often change once it has captured office. A recent example is George W. Bush’s comments in the presidential debate of 2000 on the overextension of U.S. commitments around the world and the tendency to use American power as “rent-a-troops.” Yet since the election, Bush has arguably become the greatest interventionist president since Woodrow Wilson.

But part of the problem of presidents who behave like monarchs isn’t that they were reviled abroad but how these “great” presidents were viewed at home. World War I and World War II presidents had become heroes to most mainstream historians and journalists by the late 1940s, even though those presidents either made executive agreements or stretched presidential powers to the breaking point. Still, some in post–World War II America were alarmed.

After 20 years of presidential defeats, Republicans finally captured the presidency in 1952. Initially, many were enthusiastic about containing the war powers and treaty-making powers of presidents. But people soon discovered that many of the critics of presidential prerogative were not as enthusiastic about controlling the institutional powers of the chief executive when one of their own occupied the office.

The Bricker amendment was possibly the last serious effort to turn back imperial presidents. It represented “the high water mark of the isolationist surge in the 1950s,” one historian wrote. It was also, he says, an attempt to reverse “twenty years of usurpation of Congress’ constitutional powers.”

Still, the story of the Bricker amendment is also the story of how ultimately a Republican presidency — the Eisenhower administration — with the help of Democrats, defeated it. Eisenhower complained that it represented a refusal of America “to accept the leadership of world democracy that had been thrust upon it.”

Sen. John W. Bricker was an Ohio Republican who had run as Thomas Dewey’s vice-presidential candidate in the 1944 election. Franklin Roosevelt easily won.
Purposes of the amendment

Bricker, unlike Dewey, represented the so-called isolationist wing of the Republican Party. These were men who questioned the backdoor foreign policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. By 1950 and the coming of the Korean War, the ability of a president to ignore Congress and the Tenth Amendment had become apparent to Bricker. “The constitutional power of Congress to determine American foreign policy is at stake,” he warned.

One of the goals of the amendment was to prevent presidents from liberally interpreting open-ended treaties and charters, such as the UN treaty or the NATO alliance. Both Republican and Democratic presidents came to believe that those treaties gave them huge power to enter into and wage war with little or no congressional approval. A president with myriad treaty obligations, critics said, could easily go to war without consulting Congress.

The Bricker amendment was also intended to ensure that presidents could not subvert the power of the states and Congress through executive agreements with foreign regimes. By the 1940s, more and more of them were used by the president, who shunned the sometimes-messy treaty-review process. Besides liberally interpreting existing treaty obligations, executive agreements, critics complained, were not mentioned in the Constitution. The Bricker amendment required that those agreements be submitted to Congress.

Those who backed the use of executive agreements and fought Bricker insisted they were needed to ensure that a president had the flexibility to act in foreign affairs. They include diplomatic historians such as Alexander DeConde, the author of A History of American Foreign Policy, who wrote, “Isolationists sought to shackle the President’s power at a time when international crises were moving with awesome swiftness.” On the other hand, we will see that the failure to “shackle” imperial presidents has led to America’s participation in endless wars.

Other critics of Bricker argued that the courts would prevent the presidents from making illegal executive agreements that violated the Constitution. Later, critics pointed to various Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions that have required a president to comply with the Constitution. For instance, the Case Act of 1972 during the era of President Nixon required the secretary of State to transmit to Congress any international agreement made by means other than treaty.

“But virtually every subsequent presidency has circumvented this law,” writes one legal commentator. While Democrats blazed a path of presidential imperiousness in the early and mid part of the 20th century, Republican administrations felt no obligation to return to a respectful relationship with Congress and the states.

J. Woodford Howard Jr., a legal commentator in The Oxford Guide to the Supreme Court, writes,

Covert agreements regarding South Vietnam, Sinai and disarmament, for instance, were labeled as arrangements or accords, thus requiring no report. The Iran-Contra scandal illustrates other hazards of compliance. Executive agreements are striking examples of expanding presidential power.

The roots of abuse

Bricker and others saw “expanding presidential power” coming. Indeed, given various U.S. Supreme Court decisions affirming the right of the president to make executive agreements, Bricker warned that the Tenth Amendment had become “dead as a dodo.”

Bricker was strongly backed in his efforts by Frank Holman, president of the American Bar Association. Holman in 1940 had argued that Roosevelt’s pro-British policies practically guaranteed that the United States would enter World War II. Even though Roosevelt had campaigned for reelection in 1940 on a platform of neutrality, keeping the nation out of World War II, he had been instructing the Navy to help convoy British ships in dangerous areas. In Prophets on the Right, Ronald Radosh details this policy that misled many.

By the early 1950s, Holman charged that through the use of executive fiat, “the forces of autocracy and bureaucracy were moving toward a centralized government so powerful as to destroy the rights of the individual, the rights of states, and the right to local self-government.”

The “isolationist” members of Congress also believed the rights of Congress to limit imperial presidents in matters of war and peace had been under attack at least since the early part of the 20th century.

Indeed, former Navy Secretary John Lehman, in his book Making War, documents that development even as he bragged that he participated in it:

By the mid-twentieth century, the ironic situation had developed whereby important matters were handled by informal executive agreements; unimportant matters, by solemn treaties.

In fact, Lehman, as an aide to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, advised Kissinger not to submit an agreement with the Soviets on offensive weapons in the form of a treaty. Kissinger took his advice.

This abuse of executive agreements — the abuse that the Bricker amendment was designed to remedy — had been building up over generations even in Bricker’s time. For example, in 1905 when the Senate wouldn’t approve a treaty with Santo Domingo, Theodore Roosevelt simply put it into effect until the Senate relented two years later. Roosevelt also made a secret agreement with the Japanese concerning Korea in 1907. The Senate was neither informed nor consulted.

One of Franklin Roosevelt’s most controversial actions — the destroyers-for-naval-bases deal of 1940 with the British — was deemed by his legal advisors to be an executive agreement. Therefore, it was not subject to the congressional treaty-review process. Congress also never reviewed or approved the controversial agreements made by a dying Roosevelt at Yalta, the agreements that divided Central and Eastern Europe in the waning days of World War II.
The Korean War

But the Korean War, in retrospect, seems a signal departure from any pretense of presidential legality. Roosevelt had gone to Congress for a formal declaration in World War II. In 1950, as he ordered troops to Korea, Truman never asked for a war declaration. The American president, as commander in chief, had become a king who could plunge the nation into war at his whim, critics believed.

The outbreak of the Korean War fed this fear of an imperial president who could sidestep Congress and the people. As the war became more and more unpopular, several mainstream political figures believed Truman’s actions had clearly crossed the line of illegality.

Some presidents had been much more effective or discreet in cloaking their foreign-policy power grabs. For example, many of Wilson’s pro-British policies prior to U.S intervention in World War I had been effected in secret, as was later documented by the correspondence between Wilson and his closest advisor, Col. E.M. House. Similarly, Roosevelt had quietly worked with the British in the period between the outbreak of World War II and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The Korean War was different. Here the president didn’t even seek the pretext of asking Congress for a declaration of war. He argued that UN treaty commitments gave him the right to send troops to Korea. Some maverick members of Congress disagreed.

“My conclusion, therefore,” wrote Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), “is that in the case of Korea, where a war was already under way, we had no right to send troops to a nation, with whom we had no treaty, to defend it against attack by another nation, no matter how unprincipled the aggression might be, unless the whole matter was submitted to Congress and a declaration of war or some other direct authority obtained.”

Taft, a supporter of Bricker, was going through his final illness as the debate heated up. Howard Buffett, Republican congressman from Nebraska, charged that Truman had used the UN treaty as a cover. “Truman entered the war by his own act, and not because of a United Nations decision,” Buffett said.
Defeat of the amendment

When the Bricker amendment was offered at the beginning of 1953, it had more than enough co-sponsors to pass the Senate. Yet little by little, as the Eisenhower administration turned against it, the amendment was defeated. Nevertheless, a watered-down version failed by only one vote. The vice president stood by in the Senate, ready to cast the deciding vote if needed.

Vice President Richard Nixon and Sen. Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) helped kill the amendment. They claimed it would have severely hampered the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy.

Johnson, then the Senate minority leader, called the Bricker amendment “the worst bill I can think of. It will be the bane of every president we elect.”

Here was an irony of his opposition: Johnson conceded the bill’s popularity. It was “apparent from the start that it could not be defeated by a straight-out vote. No one could vote against the Bricker amendment with impunity and very few could vote against it and survive at all,” Johnson told his aide Bobby Baker.

Johnson and Nixon would later be the main beneficiaries of its defeat, each waging tragic wars and doing it in ostensibly legal ways during their presidencies. Johnson, as president, later sent 500,000 troops to Vietnam after campaigning against the Vietnam War in 1964. Nixon, elected in 1968 to end U.S. participation in the war, secretly expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos.

Others responsible for torpedoing Bricker included Republicans who, when out of power in the 1940s and early 50s, had been warning that the presidency was destroying the constitutional separation of powers.

We speak now of President Eisenhower and his first secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. They had once shared many of the objections of “isolationists.”

Here is what Dulles said before he became U.S. secretary of State:

Treaties can take powers away from Congress and give them to the president. They can take powers from states and give them to the federal government or to some international body and they can cut across the rights given to the people by their constitutional Bill of Rights.

Later called to account in the debate over the Bricker amendment, Dulles would say only that the Eisenhower administration would never abuse its power.

With the vigorous backstage work of the administration, the Bricker amendment failed. Yet, because it mustered many votes and came close to passage, “the fight over the Bricker amendment had important consequences,” writes Duane Tananbaum in The Bricker Amendment Controversy. “Even though the amendment was defeated, the conflict made Eisenhower and his advisers more aware of Congress’s resentments over past encroachments by previous presidents on legislative prerogatives.”

The Bricker amendment, which has been reintroduced from time to time in Congress, remains relevant in an era of the imperial president, an era in which the protection of liberty requires the restraint of the institutional powers of the president. Frank Holman, in his memoirs, called the Bricker amendment a good cause:

“However long the fight for an adequate constitutional amendment on treaties and other international agreements,” he wrote, “it will and must be won.”

Gregory Bresiger is managing editor of Traders Magazine and also writes for the New York Post Sunday Business Section.

This article originally appeared in the June 2008 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.

There are few people today who pound the drum about the Tenth Amendment and still fewer who have any idea what is says. In fact, in general few Americans get exercised about our Constitution at all. Precious few have read it and politicians increasingly avoid it like the plague. With all the excitement that TV offers these days, who has the time or inclination to read the Constitution or The Federalist Papers. We are an uninformed nation and most of that is our fault.

Quite a while back the late Francis Schaeffer made the point that Americans need two things to keep them placated: personal peace and affluence. Schaeffer hit a home run (back, back, back, back, and gone!) with that observation. In our individualism we believe that as long as things are relatively peaceful we’re good to go, especially if we have the requisite affluence to carry us along.

Of course, lately Americans have learned that they are bearing the burdens of bad ideas. We haven’t built an oil refinery on U.S. soil in thirty years. The politically correct social engineers bullied us into keeping our mouths shut (after all, who wants to destroy the planet?) about drilling in ANWR, Utah/Colorado, and offshore on the East and Left coasts and we let them. Neither “we the people” nor our elected representatives had the requisite manhood to stand up to the iron fist in the velvet glove.

But now Americans are disturbed about the affluence part of the equation. Some on radio and TV broadcasts are preaching doom and gloom, which just shows that they don’t know the first thing about economics and capitalism. There are a number of sure fire ways to mess up a personal, state, and federal budget. All you have to do is raise taxes (which never produces higher revenues, and even if it did, the liberals would spend it on junk), blame the rich, promise universal health care, and promise that you’re from the government and you’ve arrived on the scene to help those who are incapable of helping themselves.

Just as an aside, did you ever turn off Oprah, Dr. Phil, The Gilmore Girls, and the WWF long enough to ask yourself how people survived before the government became the “womb to tomb” Santa Claus? All kinds of weird things happened like families pitching in to help those in need, churches coming to the aid of those in trouble, and charitable organizations also helping because none of these entities were taxed to the bicuspids. All told, the government (at all levels) is currently hitting up the American taxpayer for approximately 40% of his or her hard earned income every year. This is absurd, but we cave on this one too.

By the way, for those goody-goody emerging social gospel advocates (Gushee, McLaren, Wallis, and all their devotees) here’s a news flash for you: When you give government a place in the welfare process you need to inform the American public that 70% of what is allocated in the federal welfare budget goes to “administrative costs.” From an economic viewpoint that is highly effective, isn’t it? There is a 70% waste factor. Private enterprise could do it much better with substantially lower admin costs. The 70% is the poster child for government efficiency.

If you ask the garden variety man or woman on the street if we’re in a recession, they’ll answer “Yes, of course!” If that is your answer, put on the dunce cap. Our economy is not in a recession. What is the textbook description of a recession? It is two successive quarters of negative growth in the economy. We are not there; it has not happened. Might it happen? Sure, but if you understand anything about the free market and capitalism, then you’ll understand that a recession is an occurrence that brings us back to reality. We like the affluence thing and when the economy is good we like to think that it is great. The Bible warns us about greed and how it affects others as well as us (cf. Ezek. 16:27; Hab. 2:5; Matt. 23:25; Luke 11:39; 1 Cor. 5:11; 2 Pet. 2:3, 14). Ironically, greed and affluence can make us very sloppy, lulling us into the belief that our house of cards will never come crashing down. Can you say “sub-prime”? How many of the houses that are in foreclosure today were really out of the financial reach of the consumer, who threw caution and prudence to the wind?

Now what do those people want? They want government to bail them out. In other words, they want to act foolishly and irresponsibly and then to ask the American taxpayer to rescue them from their frivolity. This is analogous to people out here in Southern California who buy million dollar houses in either Laguna Beach or Malibu in very high risk areas where fires and mud slides are a common occurrence and when the inevitable happens they want us to fork over our money because their dream house was destroyed. Wherever we turn, we claim to be free, but want government to come to our aid. It’s just now coming to light how many billions of dollars have been wasted or is unaccounted for in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

This was not what the Founding Fathers envisioned folks. James Madison, the fourth president of the United States wrote this in The Federalist (no. 45): “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace negotiation, and foreign commerce…. The powers reserved to the several states will extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state.” (Emphasis added.)

Does this sound like the America you live in or does it rather sound like the exact opposite of what this country is like now? In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall (Marbury v. Madison) wrote, “The powers of the (national) legislature are defined, and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the constitution is written.” The Founders were wary of centralized government and as I mentioned last time, included numerous verbal negatives about the government and its power. The Federalist No. 33 explains that a congressional act beyond its enumerated powers is “merely an act of usurpation” that “deserves to be treated as such.” That should get the government’s attention, but the Constitution has been so long forgotten and almost never read that our elected officials need not fear of Americans bringing this to their attention.

But why shouldn’t we? As Walter Williams recently wrote, ‘Both parties and all branches of the federal government have made a mockery of the checks and balances, separation of powers and the republican form of government envisioned by the founders.”[1] Indeed, but we have sat by and done nothing. Personal peace and affluence trumps almost everything. Oklahoma State Representative Charles Key (Rep.) has introduced House Joint Resolution 1089 into Oklahoma’s state assembly. It fell like a bomb in the playground of elected officials. The good news is that Key’s resolution passed in the Oklahoma House of Representatives 92-3. This is encouraging news, even though the Oklahoma Senate sat on it until adjournment. Keys was neither dissuaded nor discouraged and plans to reintroduce the bill when our politicians manage to roll back to their jobs in their black limousines.

The crux of Key’s bill is the resolution “by the Houses of Representatives and the Senate of the 2^nd session of the 51^st Oklahoma Legislature: that the State of Oklahoma hereby claims sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States over all powers not otherwise enumerated and granted to the federal government by the Constitution of the United States. That this serve as Notice and Demand to the federal government, as our agent, to cease and desist, effective immediately, mandates that are beyond the scope of these constitutionally delegated powers.”[2]

Have you heard about this on the news? Has either candidate made mention of how this is such a good resolution because it points us in the right direction regarding getting the government out of our lives? No and no. Other than Ron Paul, Grover Norquist,[3] and Walter Williams, few seem concerned at all. Even Newt Gingrich, who called Norquist’s book a brilliant introduction to the coming revolution in American government, makes scant mention of the Constitution in a book that purports to bring about Real Change in America.[4]

How Low Can You Go?

I hear that President Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet; under 30% of Americans think he’s doing and excellent job. There is certainly justification for those ratings. His spending policies are comparable—if not worse—to those of the Democrats. He made a debacle of No Child Left Behind, costing the taxpayers inordinate amounts of money and his overtures to the likes of Ted Kennedy ended in disaster. When it comes to securing our border to Mexico, the President seems totally clueless and unwilling to listen to the will of the American people. It was only when it was painfully and evidently plain that immigration reform was going to cause a revolution, he backed off pushing through ridiculous legislation. For once in a long while, the President and Congress actually listened to “We the people…” The American people got angry, said enough was enough, and were mobilized to get something accomplished. That is a rare commodity these days.

I mention the anger and Bush’s approval ratings to make another point, however. The latest Rasmussen Report states that just 9% of Americans say Congress is doing a good or excellent job. 9%! If Bush’s ratings are bad—and they are—what should be said about Congress? Ever since the Rasmussen boys have been doing their reports and polls, this is the first single-digit approval rating on record. How can Pelosi, Reid, and the rest of that crowd that promised us so much throw stones at Bush’s house when they’re 21 percentage points below him? Scott Rasmussen and his merry band go on to say that just 12% of voters think Congress has passed any legislation to improve life in this country over the past six months. The highest percentile for Congress in this category for all of 2008—up to and including now—is 13%.

So what are they doing with our tax dollars? Can you name one thing that Pelosi and the Democrat majority Congress has done? Are you pleased with the gasoline prices? Have you taken the time to write or call your Senators and Representatives to tell them you want them to stop the ban on offshore drilling and in ANWR? If you’re dissatisfied, why do we keep electing the same people every time? Are you aware that the Constitution says that every state only really needs one representative, two Senators, and representation in the Electoral College. In fact, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North and South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming has precisely that arrangement.

[2] Ibid.

[3] See his book: Leave Us Alone, Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, (NY: William Morrow, 2008).

[4] Newt Gingrich, Real Change, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2008).