On February 16, 2011, the Idaho State Legislature passed a bill by an overwhelming 49-20 vote nullifying, in its state, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act popularly referred to as “Obamacare.” Is it Constitutional to say no to the Federal Government when a state believes a Federal Mandate to be unconstitutional? Eleven other states appear prone to do the same thing. The Tea Party movement largely supports the nullification doctrine. Twenty-eight states have sued the federal government for having exceeded its Constitutional power, but Idaho is the first state to say, “no will do.” Can they do so?
Such has never been presented to the Supreme Court but the issue has two historical precedents. Thomas Jefferson in 1798 attempted to nullify The Alien and Sedition Acts created by his Federalist Party predecessors. These raised residency requirements for citizenship from 5 years to 14. Moreover, the law allowed the president to deport “dangerous” foreigners during times of peace and imprison them during times of hostilities. Anyone defaming or impeding government officials, including the president, was subject to heavy fines and/or imprisonment. Jeffersonians objected on the basis of the unreasonable empowerment of the president and the attack on the First Amendment, particularly freedoms of speech and press. They too said, “no will do.” The Supreme Court never took the case, largely because the bill was design to last only until 1801, (Federalists did not want it used against them should they lose the next election) thus the issue remained unresolved.
Next to use the Nullification Doctrine was South Carolina with respect to the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations,” believed by them and neighboring states to be unconstitutional. Opponents to it declared it to be “null and void” within their border and threatened to take South Carolina out of the Union if Washington attempted to collect custom duties by force. President Andrew Jackson prepared to invade the state. A compromise Tariff of 1833 gradually lowered the tariff to acceptable levels and the issue faded away; again with no Supreme Court ruling.
When the Founding Fathers created the Constitution they recognized two co-existing governments known as Federalism: one, the federal government, to function primarily externally, the other, the states, to manage internal functions. Like a marriage they functioned—neither being master nor slave. Of the two only the federal government was restricted in its functions by a list of 17 specific powers found in Article I, Section 8. The Founders knew that all national governments like to grow. The states were left unrestricted. To make doubly sure that this limitation on the federal government was permanent the States insisted on having a Bill of Rights included in the Constitution as a condition of their acceptance of it. Amendment 10 reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution…are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Unfortunately for power-hungry federal politicians, the word health is not in Section 8, nor has it been added to the Constitution by way of amendment through Article V, which is the process for “change that you can believe in,” and thus it is devoid of Constitutional authority. If we are to follow the Constitution as intended, and not make a mockery of it, health related question are state functions at best and cannot be moved to a Federal jurisdiction without a 3/4th affirmative vote of the states as per Article V of the U.S. Constitution. Idaho has every right to say, “no will do” and more states should do the same.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College.
Dr. Harold W. Pease
“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi March 8, 2010, before the passage of the National Health Care legislation. It turns out that buried deep within the 2,700 page bill there exists funding to the tune of $105 billion dollars built into it to the year 2019, including five billion for this year alone. Is funding beyond the length of time a member is elected to serve constitutional? Definitely not!!
Why would they do this? The planners knew that given the length of the bill (more especially the several hundred pages injected the night before the final vote) that it would not be read. They also knew, given the massive Tea Party rejection of ever more government in our lives, that it was not popular and that they might lose control of the House in the November 2010 elections making possible the refunding of Obamacare. Whether Americans are in support of the Bill or not this has to go down as the most deceitful piece of legislation in American History. Every lawmaker who did not read it fully should be fired in the next election and everyone who did, and let this kind of hidden funding pass, rejected as well.
What is wrong with it outside the massive indebtedness passed to our children and grandchildren who are already slaves to a debt of over 14 trillion dollars? It also seriously damages the Constitution as well. Article I, Section 7, requires that “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” All spending is also taxing. Spending necessitates taxing or inflating the currency which is also taxing. This was placed in the Constitution to insure that the people were never over taxed as it is the nature of all governments to grow and doing so necessitates taking more money from the people. All taxing bills would also have clarity and transparency as such. The idea of hiding a tax measure, more especially guaranteeing funds for eight years into the future (literally added in the middle of the night as mentioned), would have been foreign to the Founders.
Section 8 of the same Article, Clause 12, defines a spending limit of two years for money financing war. “To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.” The reason for the two-year limitation on this, and everything else, is that members of the House of Representatives are elected for two-year terms renewed only if they continue to reflect the will of the people. They have no constitutional legitimacy to force the extraction of tax monies past the time they legitimately represent the people—two years.
The $105 billion assures the implementation of the 159 new federal bureaucracies created by the bill no matter what the people or any future Congress feels about it. This appears to be intentionally designed to bypass Congress’s normal appropriations process and to keep the next Congress from undoing their work. Once these bureaucracies are in place it is nearly impossible to undo them, as the thousands of new bureaucrats in place will be highly motivated and vocal to prevent their dismantlement. The 112th Congress, the House of Representatives in particular, must act immediately specifically identifying and defunding each program one-by-one before any already allocated funds are spent and before moving on to any other business. This is that critical. Goliath grows bigger everyday and will forever eat increasingly more out of the taxpayer’s pocket.
For the 111th Congress to extend its’ jurisdiction for an additional eight years, in effect reducing the power of the next four Congresses, is unconscionable. By not challenging this precedent, established by a Constitutionally rogue Congress, it could be used by other Congresses in the future. This must not be permitted. This may well be the most corrupt Congress in U. S. History—certainly one of the most damaging to the U. S. Constitution. The 112th could be second if it does not reassert its power and return to the constitutional appropriations process. Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College.
The renewal of the USA Patriot Act, initiated by President George W. Bush within just six weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, would extend the greatest threat to the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution since World War II. On February 8, 2011, the House of Representatives unsuccessfully sought a further extension of the Act through the end of 2011, failing largely because Tea Party House support was not there. This surprised Republican Party leadership; avid supporters of the Act, but Tea Party Patriots are dedicated to the Constitution first. Without an extension, the Act is set to expire on February 28, 2011.
The Fourth Amendment reads, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
This was placed in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution because of the tendency of the British government to simply walk the streets arresting anyone who looked the least bit guilty of something, invade their premises, and draw up accusations based upon what they found. The Founders saw this as harassment and invasion of privacy and did not want our government empowered to do the same thing.
Among other things, the USA Patriot Act allows searches without notice to the suspect; grants roving wiretap warrants that allow government eavesdropping on any telephones used by suspects; and allows the interception of email. So much for the right to be secure in one’s “houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches.” All of this is Constitutionally permitted only with a search warrant that emanates only upon probable cause (a real definable reason). Reasonable is determined, not by the secret agent snooping through your papers or eavesdropping on your conversations, but upon probable cause determined by someone disassociated from the accusing party, a judge, who holds his position by his sworn oath to preserve the Constitution. Even then such a Warrant must describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. All of this must precede governments disturbing your house, papers, and effects.
The USA Patriot Act also allows investigators to obtain information from credit card companies, banks, libraries, and other businesses; authorizes the seizure of properties used to commit or facilitate terrorism; and allows the indefinite detention of non-citizens whom the “Attorney General believes may cause a terrorist act,” all clear and major violations of the Fourth Amendment. How could the Constitutional language “not be violated” be any stronger? The American Library Association objected and issued a statement that the Act “allows the government to secretly request and obtain library records for large numbers of individuals without any reason to believe they are involved in illegal activity (USA Patriot Act, Wikipedia).”
With the word terrorist poorly defined one wonders why the government was/is more interested in internal terrorists (fellow Americans) than external “terrorists” (foreigners). The same government appears unconcerned about our very porous southern border even knowing that many come across from terrorist countries—even Hezbollah (See “A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border,” House Committee on Homeland Security, 2006).
All of this initiated by a Republican President and approved by a Republican Congress with almost unanimous Democratic Party support, falls short of meeting even basic constitutional standards of due process and fairness, as it allows the Attorney General to detain persons based on mere suspicion (see USA Patriot Act, Wikipedia). Where were the Constitutionalists from either party? Certainly, the times were drastic and unusual but the urgency was over-stated and is now largely gone thus mere renewal is not the proper course. We have time and another chance to do this right without distorting the Constitution. Hopefully the Republicans who gave us the USA Patriot Act will join their Tea Party and Democratic Party colleagues on preserving the Constitution instead.
Dr. Harold Pease is an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He has taught history and political science from this perspective for over 25 years at Taft College.
We are presently over 14 trillion dollars in debt, three trillion of which was incurred the last two years under President Barack Obama. So what is a trillion dollars? Let me try to give some perspective. To begin with a trillion is the number 1 followed by twelve zeros. A trillion dollars is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million. This still means very little to my students who count their money in fives, tens and twenties.
One mathematician gave us a more practical way to evaluate our outstanding debt. One trillion one-dollar bills stacked atop each other (not end to end but flat) would reach nearly 68,000 miles into space—a third of the way to the moon. If so, the debt incurred under President Obama alone would take us to the moon. Moreover, if you like traveling atop this stack of ones, you could return to earth for yet another three trillion dollars which is six trillion dollars. You could repeat your visit to and from the moon for yet another six trillion, making 12 trillion total. We have two trillion in debt remaining, just enough to get us two-thirds of the way to the moon again (See CNN News Cast, Feb. 4, 2009).
Senator Mitch McConnell gave another illustration just as awe striking. He calculated that if we spent a million dollars every day since Jesus was born we still would not have spent a trillion dollars—only three-fourths of a trillion dollars. We would have 13 1/4 trillion left.
Someone else equated our national debt to seconds and concluded that a million seconds is about 11 ½ days and a billion seconds is about 32 years. A trillion seconds is about 32,000 years thus 14 trillion seconds is 448,000 years (See CNN News Cast, Feb. 4, 2009). This is not helpful and only makes my head spin. My Ph. D is not in math.
I ask my students, “Who gets to go without so that this debt can be paid?” Go without?” That is a concept foreign to this generation!! They do not know and neither do their parents and grandparents who laid it on their backs. When they are told that their immediate share of the debt is $127,529 (see USDebtClock.org) due immediately, they are angry. The 13th amendment ending slavery has been rescinded. The past generation wanted nice costly programs for free and were willing to sell their children in order to drive new Cadillac’s now. Well, the Cadillac’s are in the auto wrecking yards, Communist China owns a tenth of us and the bills are due. What is worse the older generation is still anxious to incur even more debt on our defenseless children and grandchildren. Are we the most debt addicted, insensitive generation in all human history?
But there is hope. When you go bankrupt in your personal life you are expected to sell everything that you own to get out of debt. The nation has one asset left that could probably vaporize this national debt and do so in one generation but I am reluctant to bring attention to it until we have learned the lesson that we cannot spend beyond our means without someone paying for it latter. Unfortunately, neither party is fully there yet. Sell government land. Most are surprised to learn that the federal government unconstitutionally owns a third of the landmass of the United States. The Constitution limits the amount of land that the federal government can have to 10 square miles for a capital and land acquired through the limits of the Constitution for military purposes.
Over the decades the federal government withheld the land that went with statehood in the West. New states were so anxious to gain statehood that they overlooked the omission. According to public land statistics Alaska owns only 1 ½ % of itself. Arizona 56% of itself, California 52 ½ % of itself, Idaho 36% of itself, Nevada, a mere 12% of itself, and Utah 36 ½ % of itself. We, of course, would have to restrict foreign countries and perhaps place a limit on individual takes, but the idea would be to spend every penny derived from the sales to liquidating our 14 trillion dollars of debt.
On September 19, 1796, just prior to leaving the presidency, President George Washington issued his famous Farewell Address. He said that he offered his advice as the “warnings of a parting friend, who can possibly have no personal motive to bias his counsel.”
In his usual stately manner, as the father of this great nation, he warned posterity of possible pitfalls that could undermine or destroy liberty. His warnings may well be even timelier today as we commemorate his birthday.
In strong terms he cautioned us to avoid debt. He said: “As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit … use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense … [Use the] time of peace, to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.”
Today our national debt exceeds 14 trillion—the highest in our history—three trillion of which has come about in the last two years. This is about $127,700 for every taxpayer in America growing at $171 per week (See USDebtClock.org). The President’s 3.73 trillion dollar new budget, 2 trillion of which will be passed on to posterity, does not suggest that we are following this wisdom.
Washington pleaded with the nation to keep religion and morality strong. He said: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.… Let it simply be asked, where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? … Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
The Founding Fathers never supported the notion of separation of religion and government—only the separation of an organization of religion from government. What would Washington say of the immorality that prevails today?
His warning about foreign aid was especially good. He basically told us that gift giving in foreign affairs is a good way to be universally hated. He said it placed us “in the condition of having given equivalents for nominal favors, and yet of being reproached with ingratitude for not giving more.” Today there is hardly a nation in the world, dictators and tyrants alike, that does not have its hand out, and when the amount is reduced or terminated we are hated all the more for it.
He warned against the origin of “combinations and associations” whose intent was to suppress the desires of the majority in favor of that of the minority. He called them artificial power factions. We call them special interest groups. Such factions, he said, “may answer popular ends and become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.…” The antidote for this, Washington explained, was “to resist with care the spirit of innovation” upon basic constitutional principles or premises no matter how flowery, appealing or “specious the pretext.”
Washington worried about posterity not holding their elected officials strictly to the limits imposed by the Constitution. He knew many would seek to undermine that document by twisting it to give power they could not acquire without the distortion. He said: “But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.” Today much of what the federal government does is not even mentioned in the Constitution.
But patriots are not likely to be popular. “Real patriots,” he said, “who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious; while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.”
Our practices are largely the opposite of what George Washington advised. No wonder we have all the problems he predicted and are losing our freedom.
Almost all political pundits were amazed with the extent of the Republic Party victory in the midterm elections when sixty-three congressmen and six senators were replaced, making this election perhaps the biggest one-party swing in the House of Representatives since 1932. Certainly the republicans had not earned it. Their departure from constitutional limited government, the free market, and fiscal responsibility during the George W. Bush administration amplified in the Barack Obama administration, resulted in the Tea Party movement. Moreover, their endorsement of slow socialism, as opposed to fast socialism as espoused by most democrats, certainly did not endear the GOP to the majority of Americans who mostly wanted big government to just leave them alone.
The Tea Party movement was responsible. It moved the Republican Party closer to America’s core values (now those of the Tea Party), even causing them to pull the badly neglected Constitution out of their pockets (some few actually carried it with them to use as some kind of prop when needed) and open the previously unturned pages. That said, they actually read it in The House of Representatives and should be applauded for having done so. Those of the opposing party probably had to go online, or to a bookstore, to find a copy. We still await Senator Harry Reid to follow suit with a similar reading in the U. S. Senate. The democrats probably will not do so as many no longer even pretend to follow it. I hope that I have shamed both political parties with their measure of neglect of this document.
So what about the December political tsunami? The election gave the clearest rejection of the political direction that has been given in several decades. What should a congress do, realizing that they have proceeded down a path that so alarmed a majority of their fellow citizens? Let them slow down and walk away with some dignity! Instead, in total contempt of the American people, the 111 Congress accelerated their disregard for limited constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, and the free market. They were so “hell-bent” in the opposing direction it was as though there had been no election. With their “the sky is falling” type of legislation, the rejected party bulldozed forward. Americans were hit with at least seven major pieces of legislation that had to be approved within a month and before the new congress was seated, each of which should have had at least two months of hearings and serious debate before a vote. One party government still prevailed for another month, and “Yes We Can” was still their war cry.
Among them was a revision of food legislation, the new Food Safety Bill, in place since 1932, gave expanded power on domestic production to the Federal Government and cost an estimated 1.4 billion to implement. A new Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia (START) in which Russia threatened lawmakers not to alter the treaty’s terms as they wouldn’t renegotiate if anything were changed. Why did we not wait for the new congress rather than let those removed from power in three weeks have final say? We cowered under Russia’s intimidation strategy, and both the President and Vice President went to the phones pushing for quick acceptance. Debate was limited. Yet another major change allowed gays to serve openly in the military.
Everything was placed on fast tract. Another major piece of legislation was The Dream Act, designed to assist young illegal immigrants in becoming citizens if they attended college or joined the military. It alone, of all the measures, failed. Then came the compromise extending both unemployment compensation for the nth time, at an estimated cost of $858 billion, and the Bush Tax Cuts. Finally, there was the bill funding the government, due early last fall but not legislated prior to the elections as the party in power did not want their fiscal irresponsibility “flash-lighted”—a mere 1.3 trillion dollar bill—laced with gobs of self-serving pork. The bill passed as is until March. Funding the government and the extension of the Bush Tax Cuts were the only two issues that needed fast track status. The new congress could do everything else.
This collection of sweeping laws, the most in a single month in my lifetime, is dubbed December’s Political Tsunami. The vast majority of which was at odds with the message of the mid-term voters: slow down, the sky is not falling, and more debt must cease to be the solution to every problem. So many changes in a mere 3 ½ weeks were head spinning.
