If you don't remember your government studies, the federal government is allowed to legislate in only four areas; Taxation, Interstate Commerce, National Security, and the Manufacture of Currency. All other areas are reserved for the States.
My friend David has written an excellent opinion piece on what big government is doing. I don't care about your political persuasion, you would do well to read this piece and think seriously about the consequences of allowing government to run unfettered. It is affecting everything we do today and will continue unless we demand that our leaders follow the U. S. Constitution. Here's David.
Among the other idiotic and ludicrous rules passed
by New York's Mayor Bloomberg recently, we now find that he is banning pizza
deliveries from bringing along a two liter bottle of soft
drink. It doesn't seem to matter how many pizzas you
order for how many people.
How has this type
of thing happened?
From a legal standpoint, I guess he
can do this under authority granted to him by the State of New York, but with
the federal government, the trend started way back in the
civil rights era. For example, let's take
what is called the "Public Accommodations Act", which prohibits
private business from discriminating against customers by
race. Constitutionally, the only federal law which
could have been passed, and even it can be deemed of dubious legality by many
because of the states' rights issue, was to throw out state laws enforcing
racial segregation. Well and good, but to force private
business owners to serve anyone they don't want to serve, as the act did, is a
basic denial of property rights. I would stress the word "basic".
If I, as an owner of a restaurant, put a
sign up stating that I don't serve redheads, short people, and
illegal aliens, it is my right to do so. If certain members of the public don't
like that, then they can eat somewhere else. The fact is, one can still not
serve redheads, short people, and illegal aliens if one wishes, but one must
adhere to federal law requiring the serving of an ever increasing list of
"minorities" such as blacks and homosexuals. It's almost to the
point to where one is only allowed
discriminate against white males.
If a state has
laws enforcing racial segregation, then it can be argued that the
federal government has the authority to prevent that under the
Equal Protections Clause of the 14th Amendment. However, there is no constitutional
requirement for a private business owner to be limited in his
right of whom to serve and whom not to. This is a concept invented by the Congress in 1964 and backed up later by the
Supreme Court by stretching the 14th Amendment far beyond its original
intent.
An example of how the 14th Amendment has been
warped beyond its original meaning, if you care to
research it you will find that the
same Congress which passed the 14th Amendment passed
a law the following year requiring racial segregation in the schools of
Washington, D.C. Obviously, the amendment was not meant to apply to public
schools, yet that is what the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation was based on. Well, that was the
only Constitutional factor, most of the decision was based on
sociological factors which are not supposed to be part of the court's
purview.
The PAA (Public Accommodations Act)
then evolved into prohibitions of discrimination in most any area one can
conceive of, almost none of them Constitutional. It is
interesting to note, and now almost forgotten, that the original PAA did not
apply to bars, beauty shops, barber shops, and several other types of businesses
which escape me for the moment. Apparently it was okay to discriminate some places
but not others. These exceptions were deleted in later
years. Federal laws were passed prohibiting racial discrimination in
employment, lending, and many other areas. For the most part, the application
of genuinely equal rights did not work. It was then
that the federal government dreamed up the idea of forced school
busing to equalize the races, racial quotas in employment,
school admissions, and gerrymandering of voting districts to
guarantee black majorities.
The goal became equal outcome, not equal rights. As one jurist put it, apparently without realizing the illogic, "It's
okay to discriminate in order to get rid of discrimination."
So what do we have today as a
result? We have more blacks in all black schools than we did in 1954....and
they are not doing well. Three years ago Louisiana put out the results of the
previous year's achievement tests and blacks scored lower
on average than they did when the schools were segregated. And
I would point out this is after tests have been
considerably dumbed down.
In employment, many blacks hold positions they are incapable of
handling. They are there because federal law requires there be no "disparate
impact" on the black race in areas of employment. Qualifications simply no longer matter. In
addition to production, the effect on morale in the
work force has been devastating. As an
example, I remember a few years ago when the Houston Police Department promoted
400 blacks to sergeant who could not pass the required exam. As a
result, other applicants did not get deserved promotions and the
blacks took over as supervisors with all of the men under
them knowing they were not qualified. This is happening in
private industry, the military, and government civil service.
Folks, this is one of things destroying our
system.
So far as voting rights, there is a Congressional
district in North Carolina created so that there will be a
majority black district. It stretches almost the entire length of the state and
is less than 5 miles wide at several points, all designed to squeeze the
greatest number of blacks into the district.
While this is an extreme case geographically, the concept is not different at all throughout the
country where such districts are created specifically to have
black voting majorities, yet this is not viewed as
racial discrimination.
By the same token, a
number of colleges now have all black dormitories, black student unions,
and other black organizations. These were created by
choice and approved by the colleges; however, any such white
organizations are prohibited.
Blacks from the "New Black
Panthers" guarded voting precincts Philadelphia and kept whites from
voting there with clubs. They were videotaped, yet this
administration refuses to prosecute them. Two attorneys from the
Justice Department have testified before Congress that on orders from the
current Attorney General, no blacks will be prosecuted for civil rights
violations. Black mobs roaming the streets in dozens of cities have been
attacking whites and Hispanics, beating, robbing, and in several
cases killing them, on a regular basis since last summer. Prosecutions have
been negligible.
OK, I have gotten carried away from my
original point here. That being that the federal
government has completely overstepped its bounds in the past 50 years, albeit on
a gradual basis, to get us where we are now. In my view, they have used the
precedents established to enforce civil rights to do it, even though these new precedents, for the most part, threw out
precedents long established over the years.
For example, two Supreme Courts and over 30 federal judges down
through the years had ruled that racial segregation in public schools was
perfectly legal....until 1954.
Precedent is
one of the bedrocks of our legal system. The Founders knew that things would
change and evolve over the years. If something in
the Constitution needed changing, they provided a way to do
that through a Constitutional Amendment. That is the only way our
Constitution can be legally changed. Unfortunately, the courts and the Congress
have ignored this hard fact and we have gone from a Rule of Law to a Rule of
Men. History has proven over and over that a Rule of Men
always leads to tyranny.
How has Congress reached this
point? I just answered that in the previous paragraph. They ignore the Constitution and Rule of
Law. They pass any bill they wish which covers any area they wish. Are you aware that there has been
a law in effect now for several years which regulates the size of
your toilet tanks? Are you aware that the government is now telling you what
kind of light bulbs you can own, and they are all made in China? Find those things in the enumerated
powers of the Congress. The
Constitution does not grant Congress the power to get
involved with energy, education, health, welfare, or any of a myriad of other
things we now take for granted. They are not allowed to spend one
penny on any of these things, yet they do it anyway.
These
are matters the Founders reserved for the states. We forget that our nation was
founded as a Republic. The federal
government was granted very few powers and the states were granted all of the
rest. In other words, the states were voluntarily part of a union which they
were to control and in which the federal government had no more
power than was granted it by the states and the Constitution.
That Republic is long gone. It has been
replaced by an all powerful national government, not a
federal one, which pays only scant attention to the
Constitution.
For example, in the Executive
Branch, this president has assumed powers simply not
granted him by the Constitution. After all, he said in an
interview prior to his first election that,
"The Constitution is greatly flawed." So, he simply
ignores it. In the past year or so he issued an executive order to the Justice
Department to not enforce the Defense of Marriage Act because he
did not consider it Constitutional.
One of
the few powers granted to the Executive, and it is more of a
requirement than a power, is to enforce all of the laws of the
United States. Yet, he orders laws not to be enforced such as
with the Immigration Act. He ordered parts of it not to be enforced and added a
few provisos of his own through Executive
Orders. He took control of two auto companies, fired the president of one,
gave them money he was not authorized to give, and did all of this even though
the Supreme Court ruled in 1952 that a president had no
power to do such a thing.
He broke the law. In fact, what he did are impeachable offenses. Nonetheless, with the exception
of a few lone voices, there has been nary a peep of
protest from the Congress, the
Press, or the people.
All three branches of the
government and both parties are culpable for the disaster which
awaits us. In fact, it is breaking over our heads at this
moment. If it is not stopped, and I am pessimistic that it can be at this time,
the greatest, freest, most generous nation in the history of the
world will vanish. We will have a nation where everyone, except
for the ruling elite, is equal....that meaning equally miserable. We will
have a government which will control our every movement from birth to
death. A government in which there are few, if any, individual liberties. In
fact, it will be just like the government we fought a revolution against to
establish the original Republic of the United States. The problem is, we will
have no frontier to escape to as well as no will to fight
where we stand. The circle will have turned.
On that happy
note, I bid you adieu for the day.
Davidhttp://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/soda_ban_to_sap_your_4t5pEK0hvo3PoNZEBOdZ2L
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