Take the
problem of balancing the budget. In 1978 Congress enacted a law
sponsored by Sen. Harry F. Byrd that stated: “Beginning with fiscal
year 1981, the total budget outlays of the Federal Government shall
not exceed it receipts.” What happened? Nothing
Then there was
the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, officially titled the Balanced Budget
and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985. It was supposed to
balance the budget gradually over six years through a series of
spending cuts. Six years later the deficit was larger than before.
Now there are
several members of Congress talking about another balanced budget
act. That is a waste of time. It would be no more effective than the
two I have just mentioned. Congress isn't bound by laws of previous Congresses. It can change them whenever it
wants. It doesn't
even need to go through the formality of changing a law or repealing
it. All it needs to do is pass a bill that doesn't obey the law—and
that then
becomes the law. So legislators can get credit for passing a
budget-limiting bill when that is politically popular, and then
quietly ignore it when spending benefits their reelections. This is
why a balanced-budget amendment must be produced by a new
constitutional convention called for by the states, as specified in
Article V of the Constitution.
Another example
is earmarks, by which federal politicians obtain political benefits
by specifying local pet projects in appropriation bills. After
public outrage over wasteful budget items like the infamous “bridge
to nowhere,” Congress agreed to ban earmarks in 2011. Now,
however, there is a movement afoot to bring them back. That is why
earmarks must be eliminated by a constitutional amendment. Senator
Tom Coborn, who is opposed to earmarks, says the pro-earmarks
movement includes lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Another
much-needed amendment would require the dollar to be backed by gold.
Obviously Congress would never pass such an amendment because it
would drastically reduce government spending. So this, too, would
have to be an amendment produced by a new constitutional convention.
The above
amendments, along with several others, are discussed in my book The
Impending Monetary Revolution, the Dollar and Gold. I'm
not going to recite all the others here, but I do want to mention one
more. We need a constitutional amendment reaffirming that the
federal government has no power for any purpose not specified in its
enumerated powers in the Constitution. For instance, there is no
mention of agriculture anywhere in the powers granted to the federal
government; therefore, according to the Tenth Amendment, any such
power was reserved to the states or the people. The fact that this
plain language has not been honored by Congress, the Supreme Court or
the executive branch makes it necessary to correct this situation
with another constitutional amendment as I have described.
Jefferson
observed that government always has a tendency to expand. Here's how
the unconstitutional assigning of federal authority to agriculture
led to its expansion far beyond agriculture. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture has about 93,000 employees in the U.S. (not counting
USDA employees in foreign countries), but only about 25 percent of
them are engaged in farm programs. The rest are involved in such
far-ranging activities as electric power production,
telecommunications businesses, commercial loans, rent subsidies for
housing projects, forestry management, economic research, and
subsidized food and nutrition programs, such as school lunches and
food stamps. The food stamp program cost $550 million in 1979, $56
billion in 2009, and $80 billion in 2014.
Furthermore,
the Supreme Court precedent for empowering government to intervene in
agriculture was not limited to the USDA. Other federal agencies
enjoyed the extension of the same power. According to the Government
Accountability Office, the federal government in 2009 had six
different agencies operating “about” 26 separate food and
nutrition programs in the U.S. As of October 20, 2011, the USDA even
had more than 90 foreign offices covering 154 countries.
Is
Congress or the USDA going to cut back the federal role in so-called
“agriculture”? Of course not. The agency's role has grown with
every possible excuse that could even remotely be somehow connected
to the word “agriculture.” The same thing has been happening in
other fields outside the enumerated powers delegated to the federal
government by the Constitution. William A. Niskanen, a former
assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget and member
of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, has noted “most
of [federal
spending] was
for programs for which there is no explicit constitutional
authority.”*
(Italics added.)
Thus
we need another constitutional convention. Article V of the
Constitution provides that Congress “on the application of the
Legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a
convention for proposing amendments,” which shall then require
ratification by three-fourths of the states.
* William A Niskanen,
Reflections of a Political Economist
(Washington
DC: Cato Institute, 2008) p. 179.
