jhendon5The video has it that “This isn’t the America we were promised.”
No, the America we were promised has Article 1, Section 8 in its Constitution, which enumerates and limits the powers of Congress. Additionally, the America we were promised has the 9th and 10th amendment which provide that the enumeration of
powers shall not be construed to deny rights retained by the people, and powers not delegated are reserved to the States or the People.
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison warned us of our present situation should we ignore Article 1, Section 8 and the 10th amendment:
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare’, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.”
“For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and
qualify it by a recital of particulars.”
Letter from James Madison to James Robertson
“I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground:That all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.”
“To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to George Washington on the Constitutionality of the Bank of the United States, 1791
But what we have today is a Congress with a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.
Greed is in the human DNA and it can’t be legislated out of existence. But power is what corrupts so diluting it by preventing its centralization is the best we can do, not hoping to alter human character by legislation. As Madison wrote in Federalist 51:
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Rather than affiliate with the impossibility of legislating corruption out of existence while, simultaneously leaving the Central Authority with all its powers as, of course, socialists would have it, I would rather affiliate with the possibility of restoring our Constitution and decentralizing power, thereby returning our country to the “… America we were promised.”