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More Peskiness

Norm Singleton makes excellent points here regarding my initial blog, That Pesky Section 8. First, I certainly don’t find loyalty to the Founders and Framers to be something we should necessarily aspire to. They did, after all, consider abolishing slavery in the US, and on this supremely large and important test, they failed.

Still, one can look past this major oversight and yet maintain great admiration for the Framers and what they tried to do with the Constitution. In many ways, I wish they’d been far more explicit in what the federal government cannot do than what it can. Even when the 4th Amendment is under assault as it is today, the Bill of Rights is – in many ways – the superior section of the Constitution. For those of us who adhere to the spirit of the Constitution and its desire to “secure the blessings of liberty,” itemizing what the feds are prohibited from doing seems to work better than making vague statements. In some ways, the first eight Amendments seem to have more staying power than nine and 10, which are non-specific.

Freedomistas, however, do need to read Article 1, Section 8 especially. There it states that Congress can do things like “regulate commerce with foreign nations” and “borrow money on the credit of the United States.” It, for me, strains credibility to say that, for instance, NAFTA or CAFTA are “unconstitutional” when such plain language exists in the text. Trade agreements and budget deficits may well be bad ideas, but unconstitutional they are not.

In a sense, the 10th Amendment’s: “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,” may well have been too weakly worded. The stronger language in the 1st Amendment – “Congress shall make no law…” – may have avoided many governmental oversteps throughout history. It’s hard to say how things might have been had the Framers anticipated just how large and intrusive government has gotten.

The good news is that, even with centuries of digging a deep hole, we can stop and fill it back in.

-Robert Capozzi

Posted by Robert Capozzi on June 23, 2006 05:41 PM |

Free-for-all (frfr-ôl) -- n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present participates.

from Dictionary.com



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