Government- Poor Constitution
In September 1787, our founding fathers procured a document after months of deliberation and revision. The document was the U.S. Constitution (read and bookmark that link), the document that scrapped the Articles of Confederation and provided the framework for the Federal government that we have today. Or so it would seem.
Our Federal government is nearly unrecognizable to the one explained in the Constitution of the U.S. Our government ignores the framework and instead creates its own, one that can stretch to accommodate everything on their liberal wish-list. What was supposed to be a limited and small government, has expanded into an encompassing and overbearing power. Under the liberal policies of President George W. Bush we saw and expansion of government even beyond that of the Clinton expansion. Now, under President Barack H. Obama, we are seeing that expansion turn into an explosion. What once was considered horrendous by liberals during the Bush Administration is now being considered “progressive” and “American”. Let me be clear: There is nothing American about big government.
In our not-so-beloved Constitution (I love it, liberals don’t), Article 1 Section 8 spells out sixteen very specific powers granted to Congress, along with the Necessary and Proper clause that enables Congress to pass all laws necessary to carry out the powers in Article 1 Section 8. Think about your government today: Are they exercising sixteen powers, or far more? What was supposed to be a rigid, binding document has been defiled by politicians, warped into an elastic boundary that can easily be stretched in order to legitimize their legislation.
Take the current healthcare bill being considered by the Senate. No where in Article 1 Section 8 is the power to regulate the healthcare or insurance industry granted to Congress. The bill is clearly unconstitutional, but what does Congress do? The plug on anyway, attempting to discredit those who point out its demerits by calling them “racists”, “un-American”, and “astroturf”. No, going against the Constitution, the same document they swore to uphold and protect, is un-American.
From the government take-over of the auto-industry, to that of the banking industry, Congress continues to overreach the boundaries to which they should be confined. Cap and Tax presents another example of unconstitutional legislation that has a great deal of support. Again, no where in Article 1 Section 8 is the power granted for Congress to regulate or cap emissions.
The 90% tax requirement on AIG bonuses provides an excellent example of Congress not doing what they aren’t given the power to do, rather doing something they strictly are forbidden to do by the Constitution. The tax was clearly meant to be a form of punishment for executives, Obama even said:
“I’m choked up with anger here.”
And, As Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe explains:
“Its punitive intent is increasingly transparent,” Tribe says. “when you have Chuck Grassley calling on [executives] to commit suicide, and people responding to pitch fork sentiment, it’s hard to argue that this isn’t an attempt to punish an identifiable set of individuals who are the subject of understandable outrage.”
This goes against Article 1 Section 9 which states:
No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
The 90% tax would be considered a Bill of Attainder, or a piece of legislation that strips a group of individual rights as would a criminal sentence. This sort of “trial by legislation” is clearly prohibited by the Constitution, but Congress went ahead and passed it anyway.
The examples are nearly limitless, and new legislation is put forth each week that is unconstitutional. However, one of the largest insurrections of our Federal government has been its complete neglect for the Bill of Rights. These first ten amendments to the Constitution were included in its first copy, at the request of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They felt that without these rights being set in stone, the government would eventually try to encroach upon them, stripping them from the people. Here we are, 222 years later, and the government is doing just that. Take the 2nd Amendment, for instance:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Set in stone, that the government cannot trespass on the citizen’s right to own and carry a firearm, yet our own government forbids you from owning certain firearms (More-so under what is now the expired Brady Bill), is talking about passing a national “No-Carry” Law that would prevent citizens from legally carrying a concealed weapon, and prevents you from buying as many firearms as you’d like within a certain period of time. Individual states have even infringed this right, passing laws that prevent citizens from owning and carrying firearms, Washington D.C. even banning all handguns. The states claim that it is their 10th Amendment right to pass their own laws on firearms, as the 10th Amendment 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.
What they fail to realize is they do not have the right to pass laws already prohibited by the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment prevents not only the Federal government from encroaching on the right to bear arms, but also the state and local governments. The 14th Amendment further prohibits states from denying the people the right to keep and bear arms by stating:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
So we have the Federal government expanding power beyond that what is granted to it, state and local governments doing what is prohibited by the Constitution, and an entire culture that seems to not give a damn.
Maybe when the Federal government is knocking down their door, they will start to care.
Ahh, bringing up article 1 section 8. Trust me, I have brought up the article before to my democratic people. They’re respond as you said. They feel that the constitution is made to be “changed.” Oh, there is that word again. “Change.” They believe we need change in a system that has worked this long. Go socialistic, feel the fate of the Chineese, North Koreans, and the Soviet Union. Wait, who’s the Soviet Union? Oh yea, they don’t exsist anymore.
But when the Constitution is changed, it is to be changed by the Article V majority amending it, not by minority factions subverting majority will with PC perversions of the Constitution.
Don’t overlook that the real problem with our corrupt federal government is not crooked, Constitution-ignoring politicians, IMO, but the PEOPLE! More specifically, US citizens have evidently not been teaching their children the Constitution and its history for many generations, particularly the constitutionally enumerated principle of state sovereignty. Otherwise, citizens would have been able to stop Obama’s Stimulus Package, C&T and proposed healthcare dead in their tracks by now by pointing out the following. Given the federal Constitution is silent about such programs, the 10th A. automatically reserves government power to regulate and lay taxes for such programs to the states, not the Oval Office and Congress.
In fact, Chief Justice Marshall had established the following case precedent, now wrongly ignored, which appropriately limits the power of the feds to lay taxes.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” –Chief Justice Marshall, GIBBONS V. OGDEN (1824) http://supreme.justia.com/us/22/1/case.html
So not only is misguided Obama’s Stimulus Package and proposed healthcare constitutionally unauthorized, but the corrupt feds never had the power to lay taxes to fund such programs in the first place.
What’s going on is that state sovereignty-ignorant voters have been electing lawmakers to both the state legislatures and the federal senate who are as state sovereignty-impaired as the voters are. Consequently, these lawmakers have not been doing their jobs to protect state sovereignty by protecting citizens from the power-hungry, tax-loving, state sovereignty-ignoring “leaders” running the federal government.
Finally, the following link should give people an idea as to how Constitution-ignorant voters have shot themselves in the foot with big, corrupt federal government.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?t=199792
Too bad the majority of congress are liberals who take don’t take the constitution literally huh?
“but the PEOPLE”
I don’t think the average US citizen is corrupt, rather, that they are ignorant enough to let corrupt politicians take power. That’s why we here at My Uncommon Sense try to spread that uncommon sense around.
“The 2nd Amendment prevents not only the Federal government from encroaching on the right to bear arms, but also the state and local governments.”
I disagree. While I certainly WISH it were true, some reading I have done concerning the Constitution as of late seems to indicate otherwise.
I’ll begin by quoting Thomas E. Woods Jr. from his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History: “The First Amendment was a restriction on the power of the federal government, not a grant of power. It prevented the federal government from establishing a national religion, but it did not grant power to that government to interfere in the church-state relations decided upon by the states. The amendment clearly states that ‘Congress shall make no law’ pertaining to religion, not that Massachusetts, Georgia, or Pennsylvania shall make no law. When the states authorized the use of public funds to support various churches, no one in the early republic considered it a violation of the First Amendment, which was universally understood not to apply to the states.”
Next is a quote from Thomas Jefferson writing to Abigail Adams in 1804: “While we deny that Congress has a right to control the freedom of the press, we have ever asserted the right of the States, and their exclusive right to do so”.
So certainly the original Constitution and Bill of Rights allows individual states to do what the federal government can’t: restrict or regulate the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. Now some would say that after the 14th Amendment that all went out the door since States were now to be prevented from doing what the federal government had always been prevented from doing. But I would question that as well. Thomas E. Woods again:
“In the late 1870s, Congressman James G. Blaine introduced what became known as the Blaine Amendment, by which the First Amendment’s restrictions on the federal government would be extended to the states. Introduced again and again in subsequent sessions of Congress, it never garnered enough votes. But the very fact that it was introduced tells us something important. If the Fourteenth Amendment had really been intended to apply First Amendment restrictions to the states, why would the Blaine Amendment, which sought to do the very same thing, have been introduced in the first place?”
“It prevented the federal government from establishing a national religion, but it did not grant power to that government to interfere in the church-state relations decided upon by the states…I’ll begin by quoting Thomas E. Woods Jr. ”
That quote is on the 1st amendment. Unless I am mistaken, the first amendment is not the second amendment. Also, states are prohibited from breaking the free exercise clause via the 14th amendment, and the same goes for gun rights.
“If the Fourteenth Amendment had really been intended to apply First Amendment restrictions to the states, why would the Blaine Amendment, which sought to do the very same thing, have been introduced in the first place?”
Again, the 1st amendment. That amendment, as Blaine points out, says “Congress shall make no law”. Nothing about the States. The 2nd Amendment, however, states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Never does it restrict just the Federal government, instead restricts the act of limiting the right itself.
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.