Did our Founding Fathers create an all-powerful federal government that can wield unlimited authority over its citizens? Can it bludgeon the 50 sovereign state governments into submission on fiscal and other matters? Specifically, can Uncle Sam regulate not just our everyday activities, but our everyday inactivity as well? Moreover, can it set in motion fiscal forces that, over time, will effectively subjugate the states to the federal Leviathan? What, if any, limit is there with respect to federal authority over individuals and the states?
Only rarely does the Supreme Court accept a case that could define the constitutional limits of the federal government. Its decision to hear the many constitutional challenges to Obamacare is one such occasion. The Obama administration’s signature achievement promises to be the central domestic issue in the 2012 presidential and congressional elections — and the very nature of the issues raised in this suit all but guarantees that the political debate over Obamacare’s future will favor conservatives.
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Why? Americans instinctively tilt to the ideological right on the most basic questions concerning the size and scope of government, and concerning the government’s inability to deliver, with efficiency, high-quality services. This means conservatives control the high ground in our public-policy debates. Show me a legislative battle that boils down to a choice between a larger government that offers us more services but takes more of our money in taxes and a smaller one with fewer services and lower taxes, and I’ll show you a conservative victory for limited government. Show me a debate that requires citizens to choose between the wisdom of government bureaucrats and that of small-business owners, and I’ll show you a decisive vote for the common sense of the private sector. Ask us to evaluate the relative efficiency of federal, state, and local governments, and you’ll find a clear bias in favor of the government closest to the people. Force us to choose between personal responsibility and dependence on government, and the result will dismay our liberal friends. You get the point.
But when the debate moves down to the ground level, liberals often prevail. It is easier, after all, to argue for an increase in the budget for one isolated child-nutrition program than to defend an across-the-board increase to fund the myriad other programs that constitute our trillion-dollar welfare state.
This tug of war was painfully evident in the titanic struggle over Obamacare. Liberal Democrats and their allies knew that if they could succeed in limiting the scope of the debate to health-care issues — who will be covered, how generous their subsidies will be, and what services those subsidies will buy for them — they would prevail. The natural instinct of Obamacare’s conservative opponents, in contrast, was to elevate and broaden the debate, to raise foundational concerns that transcend health care and go to the very nature of the role and purpose of our government: Obamacare’s erosion of individual freedom, the tax and regulatory burdens it would place on businesses and individuals, its effect on jobs, its suffocating effect on the fiscal integrity and overall autonomy of the states, and even its impact on government’s role in making decisions about the beginning and end of life.
Conservatives ultimately prevailed on just about all of these arguments, it seems, but lost the final roll-call votes. Proponents of the most breathtaking expansion of government power in many decades were downright inarticulate in responding to the most frequently repeated question concerning the individual mandate: If it is constitutional for the federal government to regulate inactivity — or, as one federal court of appeals put it, to require “Americans to purchase an expensive product from a private insurance company from birth to death,” or else incur a fine — is there any sphere of our individual freedom that the federal government cannot control?
It is worth recalling the memorable way Judge Roger Vinson, the Florida district-court judge who struck down the individual mandate as unconstitutional, expressed this conundrum: “It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.”
There is no limit to the Federal Government's power and they have never limited themselves in power since the 20th Century.
Every day I get up, watch the news, and am sorrowful that the little brother of the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs didn't impact in the middle of the Washington D.C. beltway and save America from a perverted, deranged, and loathsome government.
The TSA is proof enough that our govenment is now a hostile power opposed to all that is free and good in America.
Honestly, we have to start actively stopping our young people from joining the military. You don't defend a government that means to enslave you.
Ironically, those who are always foaming at the mouth about all powerful federal governments and statism, conveniently forget that the right of the federal government to provide for defense is exactly the area where almost unlimited authority is indeed wielded, and frequently. Clearly, the might of the the nation is projected as the United States Army, Navy and so on, and not the Texas Army, or the North Carolina Navy and so on. Talking about 50 "sovereign state governments" that do not have the military power to do anything is nothing but an exercise in idiocy.
Sovereignty and comity are legal concepts that are applied whenever applicable by courts of law, and, yes, they recognize that states have sovereignty under a federal system. Whether you personally believe in it is irrelevant.
No, there is no limit. We have distorted both the structure of government, eliminating most checks to the increase of federal power, and eroded the political culture that was not merely skeptical but hostile to most uses of government. It has taken several long decades to do this, but done it we have.
Too many people believe in using government to do this, that, or the other thing. We can't go back to the view of government that obtained in 1900 or 1850 or 1800. We don't have the numbers. Everyone grows up believing that government solves problems. That won't change until the whole thing collapses. It cannot be fixed.
I agree entirely. I've come to the gloomy conclusion that the whole thing is going to collapse. It will be interesting to see what rises from the ashes. In the meantime, I don't think it's overcautious to brush up on survival skills and endeavor to become as self-sufficient as possible.
If a nation enters into a treaty where it agrees not to possess or use certain weapons, and then abides by that treaty, has it ceased to be a sovereign government by virtue of having limits on its authority? Similarly, if a group of states covenant together to form a federal government, yielding to it some powers while explicitly retaining others, how is it incorrect to refer to a state's sovereign authority in the areas where it has not yielded power?
The treaty analogy is imperfect because nations can typically exit treaties, while our Union is indissoluble, but the underlying idea that there are areas impermissible to the federal government -- areas of state sovereignty -- is clearly the idea on which our Constitution was founded, and if you don't like it then you want a different country from the one with which we started.
Mr Franc may believe this election will be about a national debate regarding the rightful size and scope of the federal government but, with respect, the only folk likely to engage in that will be the true believers on either side of the ideological divide.
This election will be about who the electorate blames for the current economic mess, and whoever can successfully convince them will get the chance to enact a variety of their favored policies. But that's not what will decide this election.
And, at the moment, the President is successfully demogoguing us all into class warfare and penury.
I don't know if I'd concur with your assessment that he's "successfully" doing so. Polls are all over the place on this. But, when it gets down to the basics, when Americans see how much the wealthy are taxed and the true progressivity of our tax system, clear majorities say that is enough. Plus, we're talking about all of this during the height of the Democrats power position. Obama has been on the campaign trail continuously, in the press every day, news conference/ meeting every other day. He's going to have used up his powder long before he should've.
At the same time we still have Ron Paul and other elves running around for the GOP with two top contenders' message time diluted by 70% - 80%. When the GOP has a candidate that the party can coalesce around, when they come out and have a firm message and when GOP Congressional leaders get on board with the GOP candidate, the game will THEN enter the real serious phase. This is merely mindless media banter. The election is still a long time away.
"Show me a legislative battle that boils down to a choice between a larger government that offers us more services but takes more of our money in taxes and a smaller one with fewer services and lower taxes, and I’ll show you a conservative victory for limited government...."
This is precisely why liberals trumpet every one of their initiatives as about protecting someone's notional "rights," or as a response to a crisis -- if not both at once. He who succeeds in dictating the terms of the debate has already won it; the rest is a mopping-up operation.
Kagan's testimony is representative of the Left in general. They've adopted something like John Dewey's notion of pragmatism - an idea is good if it moves society in a direction of greater social justice. Liberty and rule-of-law are formalisms that may have had value in their time but now mostly just hold us back.
"an idea is good if it moves society in a direction of greater social justice."
Pretty well put, but I think the actual thought process is "If the idea moves our inferiors in the direction of greater social justice, it is therefor constitutional."
I will be shocked if Supreme Court overturns Obamacare in total. If they only overturn the individual mandate then we will get to the single payer option quicker as the insurance companies go bust. Heads they win. Tails you lose.
ObamaCare is the most prominent piece of what is happening. Consider also abrogation of bankruptcy law, paying off political contributors with taxpayer monies and loan guarantees, ad infinitum.
Another example of federal intervention in the local police power, employing financial "inducement" to the point of coercion, is the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which sets federal timelines for all proceedings involving detention of minors from their parents and further provides financial bonuses to the various agencies for adoptions. Thanks, Billary!
