I am waiting for the January evening when a President of the United States steps up to the podium in the House of Representatives to deliver the State of the Union speech and does something no other President has ever done…level with the American people.
What is the state of the American union?
At the Constitutional convention in 1789, delegates of the original colonies voted to form a limited federal government. They wrote the Constitution to specifically enumerate the limited powers of the newly-formed federal government and secure inalienable rights for the people. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution codifies this intent: “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.”
There are seven articles and twenty-seven amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Nowhere in those words signed two-hundred and twenty-two years ago does it state that American citizens cannot own incandescent light bulbs. Nowhere is it written that a federal agency can grope American citizens at an airport. The Constitution makes no provision for allowing the federal government to listen to our private phone calls or monitor our email. The Constitution does not give the federal government any right whatsoever to run up a fourteen trillion dollar deficit, nor prohibit prayer in public schools, nor remove public nativity scenes, nor fight war after war after war without a single declaration by Congress. The Constitution makes no provision for dictating the number of employees a financial firm can hire or when that business can grow itself. The Constitution doesn’t mention federal government power to demand that shower heads put out no more the 2.5 gallons per minute or to regulate the flush capacity of toilets. And the Constitution doesn’t have a single word about requiring farm tractor operators-in Pennsylvania-to be over 18 years and not have a medical certificate. We might ask, where in the Constitution is the federal government allowed to determine how a citizen must dispose of lip balm in the Great Lakes coastal regions?
The list is enormous, piling up transgressions by the federal government stretching back to that day in 1789. The list is loaded with abuses, presumptions, fictions of power made up to provide the false impetuous for illegal war and pass laws and create regulations enough to cause 28 years to pass before an Atlanta airport is able to build a third runaway or cause a farmer to spend 15 hours of work per week just to comply with EPA regulations. The Constitution was not created to stifle production and dull innovation.
But which President and which Congress believed that?
What a great day that will be when the President of the United States steps up to the podium in the House of Representatives and says, “We screwed up, we’ve lost what the Founders of this great country intended and we need fix it.”
And then we do.