Introduction

As I have noted in earlier articles, my background is in mathematics and in Information Technology. To put it colloquially, I’m a geek. Before starting with the Tenth Amendment Center, getting involved in politics was just about the last thing I would have ever imagined myself doing. I would very much prefer to let the political scientists and the lawyers handle government, while I stay locked in the basement office with my pot of coffee and my ones and zeros.

But here’s the thing….

The lawyers who have been running the show over past decades have made a mess of things. A big, awful, nasty, mess. If some of us don’t get out of our comfort zones and do things we weren’t really prepared for or expecting to do, the freedom and prosperity from America’s past will just be a history lesson for our children.

As I noted in When Commerce is not Commerce, these clowns have been telling us for seventy years that an activity is subject to regulation as interstate commerce even when it is neither commerce nor interstate. The logic of this claim is farcical on its face. If the power to regulate wheat grown on a farmer’s own property falls under commerce “among the several states”, then surely the power to regulate wheat in Australia falls under commerce “with foreign Nations”. Is it absurd to claim that the Congress has authority to regulate wheat grown and used in Australia? Yes, but no more so than to claim authority over wheat grown and consumed on a farmer’s property in Pennsylvania.

In June, they took it a step further when they carved out a new power to compel us to purchase health insurance and called it a tax. Well – I am not going to play the lawyers’ games. Forcing someone to buy a product from a private company is not a tax, and growing grain on my own property to feed to my own livestock is not interstate commerce. It’s incredible to me that anyone would even try to make these assertions with a straight face!

A Rose by Any Other Name

When the federal government claims a power for itself that was never delegated by the states or by the people, what do we call it?

The progressives would like us to call it “a living Constitution”. The lawyers would like us to call it “precedent”. Personally, I think that “usurpation” is the most accurate way to describe it.

I addressed the “living Constitution” in The Tenth Amendment Prohibited The Living Constitution, so I’ll only deal with this briefly. When the Tenth Amendment was ratified, the states were saying, “we know that there are other powers that we haven’t listed and haven’t even thought of. These powers are ours, not yours”. The Tenth Amendment, therefore, proves that the very idea of a living Constitution is unconstitutional.

What about precedent? Is precedent a logically valid reason for the federal government to exceed the powers which were delegated in the Constitution?

Proponents of allowing precedent to override the Constitution would claim that the rule of law requires us to follow past decisions, that reversing course would lead to chaos. I already showed, in Does Nullification Lead to Anarchy, that failure to follow the Constitution is actually the more chaotic path. After all, is it not plain that failure to follow the Constitution is a failure of the rule of law? When the federal government exceeds its Constitutional authority, it is de facto nullification of the Constitution. This sort of nullification may not lead to anarchy, but it does lead to tyranny.

Continue: http://tenthamendmentcenter.com/2012/08/03/basic-logic-for-tenthers/