'Limited government' or hypocrisy?

By Fred Slocum
The Mankato Free Press
Fri Nov 05, 2010, 07:00 PM CDT

Fred Slocum is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Minnesota State University Mankato.

An Oct. 19 [Mankato] Free Press article urges a rigid, 19th-century school of constitutional interpretation, revived recently by the tea party. This school argues that the only powers the federal government has are those granted in Article I, Section 8, period.

Today’s political right deploys this view to insist that health care reform is unconstitutional, even though one federal judge has already upheld it under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause..[1] Don’t be seduced by the right’s claims to being the only faithful interpreters of the Constitution; they aren’t. And don’t be seduced, either, by the right’s appeals to “limited government” (a sham — the hypocrisy behind this is jaw-dropping).

First, the right wing steadfastly refuses to deal with the logical implications of their school of constitutional interpretation. If swallowed lock, stock and barrel, this view would render unconstitutional virtually every humane legislative act passed over the past 110 years: The ban on child labor, anti-monopoly laws, the minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, regulation of food and drugs, government recognition of workers’ right to join unions, workplace-safety laws, environmental-protection laws, Social Security, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act (1964) banning segregated public establishments and racial discrimination in employment.

None of these actions is mentioned in Article I, Section 8. The right’s reasoning: Therefore, every last one of these is unconstitutional — end of story, forevermore. The inescapable conclusion: The right wants to take a machete to over a century of humane laws.

(More here.)

TM comment: This is right on. The people who want an "originalist" interpretation of the constitution -- before the modern world evolved, with things like electricity, the Internet, and space travel -- usually forget that that the Constitution as written approved of slavery (Art.IV, Sec.2) and counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. Women could not vote, much less minorities, and the principal question being debated was how much property a white male needed to own to qualify for the vote. In the election of 1788, only 39,000 white men of property voted.

Is that what we want?

The so-called "originalists" and "strict constructionists" seldom follow their own philosophies when it is inconvenient, as when the "States Rights" proponents on the Supreme Court overruled the Florida Supreme Court to stop the 2000 recount and give the presidency to George W. Bush. Then, to complete the hypocrisy, they decreed that their decision should not be considered a precedent for future courts.

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