The Republican plan to start off the first session of the new House of Representatives today with a reading of the United States Constitution is giving the left the fantods — and with good reason.
At Salon, Michael Lind gives us a piece headlined, “Let’s stop pretending the Constitution is sacred.” Ezra Klein, a Washington Post blogger, told a TV interviewer that the reading as a “gimmick” and suggested the Constitution isn’t binding (though he later backpedaled).
And David Corn, under the title “The House GOP Weaponizes the Constitution,” argues that the Founding Fathers “wouldn’t cotton to lawmakers exploiting their well-crafted ocument and turning it into hollow political ammo.”
The reason for all this alarm is that taking the Constitution seriously threatens the whole liberal project. Liberals, with the Obama administration in the van guard, want a vast expansion of federal power. Yet the Constitution grants the federal government only limited powers, and it enumerates them carefully, one by one.
Most of these enumerated powers are in Article I, Section 8. When Congress starts studying the list, it is going to find it so bering. It begins by granting Congress the power to “Lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay for the Debts and provide for the Common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”
Liberals like to suggest that the reference to the “general welfare” means Congress can do almost anything it wants. But the Founding Fathers saw it as a limit on its taxing power.
They even foiled a bid by one of the wordsmiths of the Constitution, Gouverneur Morris, to change the grammar of the clause to make it read as if Congress were making a general grant of power.
James Madison himself noted that a long list of enumerated powers followed the general welfare clause. “For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted,” he asked, “if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?”
Another clause that worries liberals is the one that grants Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. The New Deal was brought up short by the Supreme Court in a case brought by a family of kosher butchers, the Schechter brothers, who argued that in trying to regulate their business the government had, among other things, exceeded the power enumerated in the Commerce Clause.
Could something similar happen to ObamaCare — which is being defended, in part, as an exercise of Commerce Clause powers?
After the Schechter case, the Supreme Court eased up, allowing major liberal programs. But in 1995, it signaled that there are limits by throwing out a federal law that made it a crime to carry a gun within 1,000 feet of a school — a law the government tried to use the Commerce Clause to justify.
Liberals also fear the clause that grants Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value. With Ron Paul now chairing a key House subcommittee, Congress may study whether this power can be used to end the creation of fiat money to fund liberal schemes.
Not all enumerated powers favor conservatives. One gives Congress the green light to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. The Obama administration is using this clause to try to thwart the efforts of Arizona to deal with undocumented immigrants.
Yet there remains the article in the Bill of Rights that big-government advocates fear the most — the 10th Amendment, which states that all powers not granted to the federal government, or prohibited to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people. There was a time when this clause was the refuge of racists.
But that’s not the case in this generation, which is one of the reasons why the reading of the Constitution today is making the liberals nervous.
Veteran New York newsman Seth Lipsky is the author of “The Citizen’s Constitution.” seth.lipsky@gmail.com