Reckless government spending and an
uncontrollable federal debt have created an unavoidable monetary
disaster ahead. The door to unlimited federal spending was opened by
President Nixon in 1971 when he severed the last link between the
dollar and gold by ending foreign central banks' ability to exchange
dollars for U.S. gold. Politicians realized that more spending
produced more votes to keep them in office; and with no limit on
federal spending, the mountain of debt just kept on growing.
Attempts have been made to limit
federal spending through a balanced-budget process. Unfortunately,
our government has become so structurally corrupt that
Congress will never reduce spending.
It is politically impossible to elect dedicated, knowledgeable
people in sufficient numbers to achieve this. Congress passed laws in
1978 and 1985 to balance the budget, but later Congresses ignored
them. Constitutional amendments were introduced in 1982, 1986,
1990, 1994 and 1995, and Congress voted down every one of them, even
the particularly toothless ones in 1994 and 1995. Congress has proven
worthless as far as reducing spending. It is not about to trim its
own power. That power must be taken away! There is fortunately a
way to do this: a Constitutional Amendment by a new constitutional
convention called by the states.
The Constitution
provides two methods for initiating amendments to that document. The
first, which has been utilized for all amendments in our history,
provides for Congress to initiate proposed amendments; but our
Founders were wise enough to provide an alternative if that should be
necessary. The second method is through a constitutional convention
called by the states. Amendments proposed by either method must then
by ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures in order to
become part of the Constitution. Now is the time to utilize this
second procedure to achieve a balanced budget amendment that the
first method has failed to provide.
A balanced-budget
amendment should be accompanied by an amendment to close the door to
unlimited spending that was opened by Nixon in 1971, which made the
dollar a pure fiat currency. There is no limit to the amount of
money politicians can spend if money is backed by nothing, but they
cannot spend unlimited amounts of money backed by material asset such
as gold.
A
balanced budget amendment and gold convertibility are vital, but they
alone will not tame Congress' profligate spending. One reason is
that Congress can use unfunded mandates to push costs onto state and
local governments that do not show up as federal spending. Obamacare
(Affordable Care Act) and the Dodd-Frank Act imposed 86 unfunded
mandates on state and local governments. One of the worst
offenders is the Obamacare's “Essential Health Benefits; Exchanges:
Eligibility and Enrollment” requirement. Even the Obama
administration admits this will add more than 12.8
million hours of paperwork to state and local governments and
cost them $336.9 million annually. This amounts to 251,000 hours per
state for this one ACA paperwork requirement. According to the
Bureau of
Labor Statistics (BLS), there are 33,600 state compliance
officers to ensure conformity with laws and regulations.
Originally, the
Constitution provided that state legislatures would determine U.S.
Senators. That was the only structural link between the state and
federal levels of government, but it was destroyed by the Seventeen
Amendment, which established popular election for senators. That
eliminated the states' ability to restrain federal spending and
increased the incentive for spending to gain popularity with voters
to win elections. Over time this process enlarged the scope and
power of the federal government and essentially reduced the states to
mere departments of Big Government. They can do only what Washington
allows, or demands, and in a manner Washington prescribes. Today it
is generally overlooked that the states created the federal
government, not the other way around. They are not junior partners or
subsidiaries. Lacking the power to print money, the states have to
pay the cost of unfunded federal mandates through taxes. The federal
government should be prevented from forcing the states to do this.
State taxes should go for purposes determined by state legislatures;
federal taxes, for federal purposes. Therefore, we need a
Constitutional Amendment stating that Congress shall have no power to
require state tax increases or how taxes are spent within the state;
the cost of all federal mandates thrust upon the states must be paid
by the federal government.
We also need a
constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court declaration in
the United States v. Butler, 1936, decision that “the power
to authorize appropriations of public money for public purposes is
not limited by the direct grants of legislative power in the
Constitution.” If the government has no power to act beyond those
direct grants, it should have no power to spend beyond them either.
We also need a
constitutional amendment to reassert that the federal government
shall henceforth be limited to the Constitution's grants of power,
which it has repeatedly violated. All three branches, the executive,
legislative and judicial, have been increasingly guilty of expanding
their roles beyond their Constitutional authority, failing to
respect—indeed, destroying—the separation of powers and violating
the Tenth Amendment, which states: “The powers not delegated to the
United States, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to
the States respectively, or to the people.”
The Constitution
vests all legislative power in Congress. The executive branch lacks
any authority to change not only the health care law but any law.
Yet President Obama has usurped Congress' legislative authority many
times, at least two dozen times in just the Obamacare law by
unilaterally rewriting parts of it to change the date it became
effective, delay the employer mandate, allow people to keep health
plans that don't meet that law's standards, etc. And the Supreme
Court likewise violated (in King v. Burwell) the separation of
powers by usurping the legislative power of Congress through
substitution of its own views rather than the clear meaning of the
words “established by the state” that Congress had used in
writing the law.” (The Court “interpreted” that phrase to mean
health care exchanges “established by the state or federal
government,” although that is clearly not what the Congress
meant.)
Actually, the
problems with Obamacare, and a myriad of other laws, would never have
occurred if the Constitution had been followed because it grants no
power over health care or medicine or insurance to the federal
government. It also grants the federal government no power over
agriculture, education, social welfare, labor relations, the
environment, business subsidies, stimulating employment, or
regulating the economy. All of those fields were “reserved to the
states respectively, or to the people.”
Federal
regulations in all these fields for which there is no authorization
in the Constitution have resulted in the regulatory agencies
exercising legislative, executive and judicial functions. In 2014
for every law passed there were 16 new regulations:
224 new laws and 3,554
new regulations. EPA accounted for about half of these, for which
the government budgeted $8,200,000,000 for 15,500 EPA employees. But
the regulations imposed a “hidden tax” of $1.88
trillion in lost economic activity and higher prices for
Americans. That's about 29 percent of the average family income and
exceeds what the average family spends on health care, food and
transportation. As of December 31, 2014, President Obama's
administration has added 21,000 new regulations that occupy 468,500
pages in the Federal Register According
to the
American Action Forum “Since President Obama took office, his
regulators have added $35 billion in unfunded regulatory costs and at
least 75 million paperwork burden hours on state and local
governments.”
Jonathan Turley, a
George Washington University law professor, writes, “Our carefully
constructed system of checks and balances is being negated by the
rise of a fourth branch, an administrative state of sprawling
departments and agencies that govern with increasing autonomy and
decreasing transparency....The fourth branch now has a larger
practical impact on the lives of citizens than all other branches
combined.”He notes that in a
typical year federal judges conduct about 95,000 adjudicatory
proceedings, including trials, while the federal regulatory agencies
complete more than 939,000
Today there are
more than 4,500 criminal laws and perhaps more than 300,000 relevant
federal regulations, according to the Heritage Foundation. “Congress
continues to criminalize at an average rate of one new crime for
every week of every year...Congress should not delegate the power to
establish crimes to unelected officials in federal departments or
agencies. Common sense and limited-government principles demand that
only elected Members of Congress make those decisions.”
EPA has arrogated
to itself the powers of the legislative and judicial branches. Its
regulations have extended the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Acts
far beyond the meaning intended by Congress and even in defiance of
two Supreme Court rulings (SWANCC v. Army Corps of Engineers, 2001
and Rapanos v. United States, 2006). For example, it has
expanded the meaning of “navigable” waters, which meant channels
of navigation for interstate commerce. Now EPA says it includes
swamps, prairie potholes, drains, seasonal depressions wet for only a
few weeks—or even a few days—a year, and ditches and culverts
hundreds of miles from traditional navigable waters. It has assumed
the power not only to write legal requirements but to judge guilt or
innocence and criminalize even unintended violations—even to the
extent of imposing jail sentences. In a previous book, The Trojan
Project, I give several examples of this, one of these being the
experience of Ocie Mills and his son Carey.
They were trying to
build a house on two lots Mr. Mills owned and on which they dumped
clean sand. They thought their action was acceptable because
they already had permission from Florida and Florida officials had
told them no federal permit was necessary. But the federal
environmental police arrested them for not having a federal permit to
dump a “pollutant” into “navigable waters of the United States
under the Clean Water Act of 1972.” Twenty-one months in the
slammer!
After serving a
full 21 months in prison, Mr. Mills failed to get his conviction
overturned on appeal. Judge Roger Vinson acknowledged that the site
of dumpling was dry land, clearly not even a wetland much less a
“navigable water.” And he deplored the twisting of wording
“worthy of Alice in Wonderland” to stretch the meaning of
“navigable water” to include dry land; but he said the court had
to apply the law as it exists and that it clearly gives the
regulatory agency the authority to make this determination.
That kind of abuse
will not be eliminated by “better regulation.” There will always
be regulators and other government officials who will expand, ignore,
or reinterpret a regulation in order to insinuate their own views, as
hundreds of examples demonstrate. The only solution is to
eliminate all such regulation, to forbid the federal government from
any action beyond its enumerated powers in the Constitution.
Some readers will
be aghast that the elimination of the federal EPA will result in
great environmental degradation. Quite the contrary says Jay Lehr,
Ph.D. and director of science at the Heartland Institute. He helped
write the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water
Act), Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act, Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, the Clean Air Act, the
Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act,
and others.
Lehr
now favors abolition of the EPA and replacing it with a Committee of
the Whole of the 50 state environmental agencies. He notes these
state agencies, having long been given primary responsibility for
implementing environmental laws and EPA fiat rulings, have more than
“30 years experience and the talent to do the job without the
oversight of 15,000 federal employees.” And 80 percent of the cost
of EPA's budget could be eliminated. He also notes the Committee of
the Whole 50 states would be “less vulnerable to lobbying and
intimidation by national politicians, activists, and special-interest
groups than are their counterparts in Washington, D.C.”
Lehr
writes, “Beginning around 1981, liberal activist groups recognized
EPA could be used to advance their political agenda by regulating
virtually all human activities regardless of their impact on the
environment. Politicians realized they could win votes by posing as
protectors of the public health and wildlife. Industries saw a way
to use regulations to handicap competitors or help themselves to
public subsidies. Since that time, not a single environmental
law or regulation has been passed that benefitted either the
environment or society.” [emphasis added.] He notes that
the politicized and unscientific course that EPA has taken has been
documented in twenty books with titles such as
Regulators Gone Wild,
Regulators Gone Wild,
Out of Bounds, Out of Control,
Hoodwinking the Nation,
Science Left Behind: Feel-Good
Fallacies and the Rise of
the Anti-Scientific Left.
the Anti-Scientific Left.
To be continued.
