Another possible view of why progressives lost so big in the latest elections (federal, state, and local). Maybe people took similar views of how to begin to curb, and possibly eventually turn back, government overreach?
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Politics, Constitutional Decline and Government Overreach
By Roger Pilon
This article appeared in the Fall 2013 Issue of the Jewish Policy Center’s inFocus Quarterly.
"What’s the Constitution among friends?” asked Ohio’s John F. Follett in the House in 1884. Still in the offing, constitutional decline was only stirring. In fact, three years later, 100 years after the Constitution was written, President Grover Cleveland would veto a bill appropriating the paltry sum of $10,000 for seeds for Texas farmers suffering from a drought. “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution,” his veto message said.
Cleveland was simply echoing a long settled understanding that ours is a Constitution that authorizes only limited government. Not that calls for more government had not been heard from the start. In 1791, for example, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton unveiled his Report on Manufactures—an early industrial policy scheme. Congress promptly shelved it. And in 1794, the Constitution’s principal author, James Madison, finding before him a bill for the relief of French refugees fleeing to Baltimore and Philadelphia from an insurrection in San Domingo, rose on the floor of the House to declare, unremarkably, that he could not “undertake to lay his finger on that article of the Federal Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending on objects of benevolence the money of their constituents.” ...
... How did a nation conceived in and dedicated to individual liberty take on the trappings of the collective mind such that so much of life today is lived through the state? ...
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At times that hubris reached disturbing lengths. One appalling example, inspired by the modern “science” of eugenics, was a push to improve our genetic pool by sterilizing those thought to be of insufficient intelligence—promoted by such luminaries of the day as the presidents of Planned Parenthood and Stanford University. Ruling for Virginia in a 1927 “sweetheart suit” brought against the state statute that authorized the practice, the sainted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded (in)famously that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” There followed across America some 70,000 sterilizations.
None of this should have been possible, of course, under the Constitution as written and later amended. The original Constitution limited Congress’s authority to only 18 enumerated powers or ends. The Bill of Rights, added two years later, further limited how the federal government might exercise those powers. And the Civil War Amendments extended those further limits and more against the states. ...
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The entire article is too long to be posted here but it is, imo, well worth reading to gain a little insight as to how we have now come to a point in time where the federal government feels that is the only answer for just about any question in citizen's daily lives. http://tinyurl.com/jlxzl5j
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