Senator Mark Warner, D.-Va., says that "there is no place in the Constitution that talks about you ought to have the right to have a telephone." Seriously, he really did say that near the end of this clip. But listen to everything that precedes it first:
In fact, Senator, you are wrong. The Fourth Amendment explicitly guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects." If this is not a Constitutional guarantee of my right to acquire property, then you certainly can't possibly get Roe v. Wade out of the emanations of the penumbra of the Constitution.
There is also the Tenth Amendment: "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." I don't need the Constitution's permission to get a telephone.
It's amazing - but chiefly frightening - that a US Senator does not know this simple fact about delegation of powers.
However, he is right on another thing: there is no delegation of powers in the Constitution for the federal government to regulate education. None, zero, zip, nada, zilch. Which of course did not stop President Jimmy Carter from signing it into law in 1979. In fact, abolishing the Dept. of Education was a plank of Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980 but, observes the CS Monitor, "It was the Democratic-controlled Congress that prevented him from doing so." The paper also recounts that the 1996 Republican agenda said, "The federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula." However, this history, and absence of Constitutional authority, did not stop Republican President George W. Bush from ramming through his siganture domestic brainchild, the No Child Left Behind act, that plunged federal fingers deeper into local schools than ever before.
But examine the subtext of Warner's reply. "Sure," he's saying, "there's no Constitutional authority for what we're about to do. But we've already trampled on the Constitution so much that there's no reason for us to stop now." And most Republicans agree with him because under GW Bush's disastrous tutelage, the Republican party became just as eager to expand federal power as the Democrats already were. No wonder a strong majority of Americans are ready to throw all the bums out without regard to party.
Richard Sanchez nails it:
While politics is ostensibly about governance, suggesting that it does something constructive, in reality is often an activity for its own sake. In other words, the purpose of politics is to serve politicians. ... There doesn't have to be a reason for their activity, only an apparent reason. The real goal of many government "reforms" and initiatives may simply be to help politicians get their hands on more authority.For what purpose, one might ask? Why do people play solitaire? Simply because.Which is perhaps a more elegant way of saying what I wrote before:
After almost 230 years of this experiment, it is entirely apparent that, regardless of which party controls the Congress or the Executive, the federal government is a a ravenous beast that devours money and craps regulations. (Den Beste's Law: "The job of bureaucrats is to regulate, and left to themselves, they will regulate everything they can.")As Gerard van Der Leun has observed about America's governance these days, "I try to get more cynical every day, but lately I just can't keep up."
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