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Enumerated Powers Act of 2013
phobicsquirrel
Posts: 7,347 ✭✭✭
Some 36 senators signed onto this legislation, could cause some problems down the road... IMO.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/02/2404301/36-senators-introduce-bill-prohibiting-virtually-any-new-federal-law-helping-workers/
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/08/02/2404301/36-senators-introduce-bill-prohibiting-virtually-any-new-federal-law-helping-workers/
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The whole idea of the constitution is to limit government. This fundamental document is the difference between tyranny and liberty. It is exactly why this country has attracted so many immigrants over the centuries from countries with unlimited government, where the tyrant can do anything he wants. The idea of the enumerated powers act is to make congress live up to its charter. The idea behind modern liberalism, on the other hand, is unlimited government. This is why any act seeking to shackle congress or the president to those powers specifically granted is anathema.
Here, stop reading clumsy liberal let's-all-hate-the-tea-party propaganda and read the bill: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/110/hr1359/text
Then we may ask ourselves why do liberals need straw men and hateful propaganda? Is it because they cannot win their statist argument without?
Think about it.
And it is not so all immigrants came to this country to escape political oppression. The, huge vast majority of immigrants came for economic reasons--most were farmers who could not longer make a living as nations switched to industrialized economies. They certainly didn't come here because they were looking for political freedom--the vast majority wouldn't have known representative government if it slapped them in the face. Certainly plenty did come here to escape religious persecution--the influx of Jews in the late 19th century was directly connected to a huge spike in anti-semitic massacres in Poland, Russia and the Baltic states fueled by religious intolerance. But these people certainly weren't attracted here because government was limited.
And, contrary to popular belief among certain conservatives, liberals do not belief in unlimited government any more than conservatives believe in no government at all. For example, plenty of liberals were against Bush's draconian freedom-limited, library monitoring surveillance policies and are outraged the continued use of these methods by the Obama administration, while plenty of conservatives support these policies. Plenty of liberals are against the government's corporate welfare for oil companies, pharmaceuticals, tobacco companies and big agriculture. Plenty of liberals are against the drone program and were against the Iraq War. There are even liberals who are against Obamacare, although their reasons may be different than those of conservatives. Plenty of liberals are against efforts by states to limit voting and limit access to abortion, while plenty of conservatives are in favor of these policies. Plenty of liberals are against out of control military spending for pork-barrel programs that even the military doesn't want but are forced to fund because of pressure from Congressmen on both sides of the aisle. So putting labels on groups is neither accurate nor particularly productive.
"If you do not read the newspapers you're uninformed. If you do read the newspapers, you're misinformed." -- Mark Twain
That is a perfectly legitimate question, and probably most people on all sides of the spectrum would say, "Yes."
The challenge here is that different people will have different interpretations of what that charter is, as defined by the Constitution. After all, the original document defined few rights other than the right to vote. Until the Bill of Rights was passed shortly after the Constitution was enacted, freedom of speech, religion, assembly, weapon ownership and use, protection against illegal search and seizure and the right of habeus corpus and trial by jury weren't guaranteed at all unless your state had codified these rights (and many had not). Yes, these amendments did limit governmental power, but not just at the federal level but at the state and local level as well. And, over time, the extent of federal powers grows or retreats based on the people in power and current political events.
But to the central question of this topic: Was the original main intent of the Constitution to limit government power? If you look just as the preamble itself, the answer is no.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...."
Note here the use of the word union--it's not saying a "confederation of autonomous states." The intent here is to enforce the idea that the U.S. was a single nation, because history had proven that a loose confederation of states did not work. Now, even then people different on what this meant. Jefferson and Madison, the nation's most prominent libertarians, believed the government should have almost no power over the states. Washington, Adams and Hamilton believed in a strong federal government. However, it took nearly 80 years (and a Civil War) for the U.S. government to truly assert its authority over individual states.
. ...establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...
This is positive, proactive language. "We the people" have established the Constitution to help ensure that a national authority would define a national standard of justice (which at the time, varied widely from state to state), defend its borders (a huge step, considering that most states were vehemently opposed to a national army).
"promote the general welfare"
This is ambigious, but given the history of the nation in the late 18th century it seems to suggest that the federal government, through its three branches of government, would define what the 'general welfare' meant and protect citizens from those would try to thwart it.
"secure the Blessings of Liberty..."
Note that here 'we the people' entrust the federal government, not our states, not our cities, not our local politicians, to both attain and maintain the liberties the U.S. had won in the Revolutionary War. Note that this is a proactive statement--it doesn't say "limit the ability of this government from infringing upon the liberties of the people." The Founders believed, for better or for worse, that the system of government they set up was the best system for ensuring that all Americans (as long as you were a white, male property owner) would have the same liberties and political rights whether you lived in the north, the south or the west. They didn't trust allowing the states to define and secure 'liberty' (slaves didn't count) because individual states defined liberty in different ways (particularly in terms of religious freedom).
"do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
This makes it clear that "we the people" created and enacted the Constitution and authorized a federal government to be formed that would guarantee our defense, secure our liberty, and promote whatever it (as defined by the three branches of government) defined to be the 'general welfare' of the nation as a whole.
One can argue when and if the system of government defined by the Constitution has fulfilled these ideals and where it's failed. But that doesn't detract from the point that the main purpose of the Constitution was to define a national identity and protect the liberties its citizens had won by war. Its main purpose was not to create a weak and limited central power--it that was the purpose, the Articles of Confederation would still be the law of the land today, slavery would still exist, and our national borders would still be in the Alleghenies.
And I agree whole heartedly both sides have faults and virtues... too often people, myself included, will get so caught up in "picking sides" that they will overlook the good in one party and the bad in the other.
And now that you have shamed me into actually reading the article quoted by the OP, I will agree with those who say the chicken-littleism expressed by the workers' rights contingent is bogus, but not for the reasons expressed by these fearmongers.
While it technically could be used to scale back workers' rights (or remove safety regulations on agriculture, mining and manufacturing), what it really seems designed to do is to provide a context for another attempt to repeal Obamacare which was allowed in the Supreme Court's decision that Obamacare is allowed under the Commerce Clause. The idea being that if Congress repealed it, this new law would make it very difficult to pass it again because it would no longer be permitted by a scaled back interpretation of the Commerce Clause.
However, it does seem that this proposal is, at best, a procedural motion that won't do much to derail legislation from either side of the aisle that some may consider "extra-Constitutional," since one assumes that its sponsor can always find some law, court case, or legal precedent to make a Constitutional case for the bill.
In any case, the lack of Constitutional precedent has rarely kept the three branches of our government from acting in ways that seem to expand federal power way beyond what it technically specified in the Constitution. Whether you agree with these acts is a matter of personal opinion. I for one am rather glad that Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, that the Marshall Court decided that Supreme Court decisions can overturn unconstitutional laws, that Lincoln enacted the Emancipation Proclamation and that Congress passed amendments freeing the slaves and granting them citizenship. I'm also glad the Theodore Roosevelt led efforts to bust up trusts, regulate the food industry, improve working conditions and set up America's national parks system. I'm also glad that the Warren Court overturned segregated education and that LBJ got the Voting Act and Civil Rights Act through Congress. Now, one could argue that nearly every one of these actions went beyond what the language of the Constitution (which, among other things, specifically declared slavery to be legal and something untouchable by federal laws) allowed. But I'm okay with that.
On the other hand, other "extra-constitutional" acts bother me a lot. It bugs me that FDR interred Japanese Americans in WWII, that Congress allowed McCarthy, Nixon, and Bobby Kennedy to conduct witch hunts to persecute Americans for their political beliefs, that nearly every president in the 20th century started some little war that was never authorized by Congress, that Bush and Obama actively supported the the trampling of our right to privacy in the name of stopping terrorism and for indefinitely suspending habeus corpus for prisoners at Guantanamo and that our entire system of government is held hostage by special interests.
So in a long-winded way, I don't worry too much about this new proposal either getting passed or having a major impact if it is passed. The workers' right crowd are making hay about dead grass.