The strength and fragility of the US Constitution

• “There is no justification for public interference with purely private concerns.”
• “The property of the people belongs to the people. To take it from them by taxation cannot be justified except by urgent public necessity. Unless this principle be recognized, our country is no longer secure, our people no longer free.”
• “I want the people of America to be able to work less for the Government and more for themselves. I want them to have rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty.”
• “No matter what any one may say about making the rich and the corporations pay the taxes, in the end they come out of the people who toil. It is your fellow workers who are ordered to work for the Government every time an appropriation bill is passed.”

How’s that for an election platform? I’d vote for that guy wouldn’t you? Actually you did, or more specifically your grandparents did, these are quotes attributed to Calvin Coolidge. The liberal historians look at Coolidge whose term was from 1923-1929, as a do nothing president, but in reality he was a largely successful one. Would to God that we had this type of do nothing president in the white house today! Their never has been the magical day when we had 100% agreement on every issue involving the constitution, but the practice of simply ignoring and disobeying the constitution is relatively new.  We can look largely to the constitutional revolution of 1937 as the beginning of what could be the end of constitutional liberty. This is also the basis for most of the current assaults from the Obama administration on our freedoms today.

The law in question was the Social Security Act of 1935. Is anyone surprised? Just as the Black court redefined the meaning of the 1^st amendment in 1948, (see last week’s post) so did the Hughes court in 1937 with the term “general welfare”. At risk of oversimplifying the case for the establishment of social security the fundamental question was this: does the general welfare clause give the congress power to act beyond the specifically enumerated powers of the constitution? article 1 section 8 of the US constitution which reads, “  The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States; but all duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”  In its most liberal interpretation the Federal government would have broad and sweeping power as long as it could show some intent for the general welfare, on this point Jefferson warned “instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and, as they would be the sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.” Likewise  James Madison warned  "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare,
they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

To apply the test of constitutionality to the social security act of 1935, we first look at the wording of the constitution. If general welfare was a broad based grant of power than the further enumeration of powers would have been redundant, this was however a concern even then and is a large part of the reason that the 10th amendment was added (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.) without which the constitution would not have been ratified.  This plus the clear quotes of the founders to determine intent make it clear that the decision to uphold the social security act was not the constitutionally correct one.

Yet this expansive interpretation of general welfare is deeply rooted in the lexicon of society and the entitlements which it birthed are both bankrupting us and immobilizing our political leadership through the paralyzing fear of alienating those voters dependent on those entitlements.

 The strength of our constitution is in its ideas; ideas are contained in those words and as long as those words are respected the freedoms guaranteed in the constitution are secure and will withstand any assault, but if those words are open to every whim of any judge than they are weak and now we are to the point that even the fundamental freedom of religion is only guaranteed to the extent the government sees fit to allow.

The Obama administration contraceptive mandate is not the first or only example of trampling the constitution it is merely the most egregious. In our next post we will begin detailing the specific Obama policies that defy the constitution and what can and must be done about it.  

I will close with one more Coolidge quote:

Because of what America is and what America has done, a firmer courage, a higher hope, inspires the heart of all humanity.

March 4, 1925

This is what we have been, and can still be if we keep on the firing line.