Category Archives: Constitution

The Supreme Court Has Destroyed Consent of the Governed

us-supreme-court As Americans celebrated the 242nd anniversary of their secession from Great Britain, references to the Declaration of Independence ratified on July 4, 1776 were many. But while the left reminded us “all men are created equal” and the right reminded us that all inalienable rights come from our Creator, far too little attention was paid to another phrase in Jefferson’s famous preamble: “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Judging from the way most Americans talk, almost no one remembers how that consent is supposedly obtained.

Hint: It isn’t from voting in elections, but that’s what most Americans seem to believe. According to this narrative, representatives are elected democratically, and by casting one’s vote, one consents to whatever legislation the representatives who win the election choose to pass, or whatever executive actions the elected president chooses to take. In the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage, surrogates for President Obama often justified that new federal endeavor with the quip, “That’s why we have elections.” Conservatives employ the same reasoning when their candidates win.

That raises the question: Why did the framers bother with Sections 8, 9 and 10 in Article I, Sections 2, 3 and 4 in Article II, or Sections 2 and 3 of Article III? Why did they include Article V at all?

The answer is that the aforementioned sections define the list of powers the people were consenting to, all others being reserved to the states or the people, while Article V was provided as the one and only means for the people to consent to any new powers. Put another way, any power exercised by the federal government that is not among those delegated in the Constitution is power exercised without the consent of the governed.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Why They’ll Really Hate You

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They will hate you if you refuse to let them rule you. They will hate you if you don’t let them plan your life, spend your money and run your business. They will hate you if you don’t let them “educate” your children. They will hate you if you pursue your own happiness, encouraging your fellow men and women to do the same.

They will hate you if you have opinions they don’t approve of. They will hate you if you have real courage, which means saying what the government doesn’t want you to say, rather than ignorantly and self-destructively parroting its talking points. In short, they will hate you if you do not do the thing all their marches, propaganda, and televised hysterics are designed to force you to do: bend the knee.

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Newsflash: Teachers Are Already Armed

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armedwoman In the wake of yet another mass shooting in a public school, a host of familiar recommendations have resurfaced about how to “prevent this from ever happening again.” Predictably, both conservatives and liberals are looking to the government for a solution. Americans have somehow arrived at a point where they cannot conceive of human action that is not either prohibited, mandated, or, at the very least, centrally planned.

Just Like Drugs

The first problem is the goal. It is absurdly unrealistic to believe any set of rules is going to prevent anything from “ever happening again.” If you doubt that, I invite you to examine the war on drugs. Many decades ago, politicians decided American citizens taking heroin was never going to happen again. They banned that drug completely. You aren’t allowed to possess or sell it under any circumstances. Not after a background check. Not with a doctor’s prescription. Not at all.

Ban them completely for the civilian population, they say, and mass shooters won’t be able to obtain them.

Today, that drug is at the center of what the same government calls an opioid “epidemic.” Epidemic. So much for heroin overdoses “never happening again.”

Yet, despite this evidence, liberals still suggest what they’ve always suggested: further restrictions on gun ownership. A good portion of them believes that only government employees charged with national defense or public safety should be allowed to carry guns. Ban them completely for the civilian population, they say, and mass shooters won’t be able to obtain them.

You know, just like drugs.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Progressives Sink to New Low Using Teenagers as Political Pawns for Gun Control

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Just when you thought the left-wing totalitarians among us couldn’t sink any lower, they have. Not content to simply exploit the tragedy of school shootings in the third person, they have now recruited teenage survivors to organize themselves as a political special interest group, demanding hundreds of millions of innocent people be forced to their will.

Shame on their parents for allowing children who have no experience yet in the real world – and no, being shot at in those soft-target prisons known as “public schools” is not the real world – to be used as political pawns by people who don’t care about them one bit.

The media lionizing these misinformed adolescents – as well as whoever is encouraging and/or funding this latest propaganda effort – are hoping no one would dare dispute the word of “the children” who survived the tragedy. I hope they’re wrong.

The answer should be some tough love to the little darlings, along these lines:

“Listen you little brats. I’m sorry you were exposed to this terrible tragedy and lost friends and loved ones. And I’m glad you survived. But none of that gives you the right to “demand” the rights of hundreds of millions of innocent people be violated, leaving them more vulnerable to precisely the kind of tragedy you just experienced.

Get back to us after you’ve paid taxes for a few years, rather than consumed them. And if you’re going to demand anything, demand your parents pull you out of the Progressive Brainwashing Centers that have skewed your thinking so badly and almost got you killed.”

You Deserve a Tax Break and Your Boss Does Too

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taxbreak_mini 3 Republicans during the Reagan and Bush administrations had a pretty straightforward fiscal policy: increase federal spending dramatically and cut marginal income tax rates modestly, predicting the resulting economic growth would eventually balance the budget. Both administrations increased spending roughly 80-100 percent, depending upon where you draw the start and end lines, given the government’s fiscal year running October 1 – September 30. Predictably, federal debt exploded during both administrations.

This time around, some things are the same, but some are different. The predictable (and predicted) growth of entitlements and the quasi-religious belief military spending must always increase (the military must be “rebuilt!”) has produced what should be a frightening result: federal debt doubled during a Democratic administration under which federal spending increased a mere 28-33 percent, again depending on where you draw the lines.

It’s All Class Warfare

So, the usual Republican modus operandi is not going to fly this time around. Not only have Republicans run on making government smaller, before again blowing up spending once they got in power, but they’ve railed for eight years against Obama’s debt legacy.

They can’t just ignore deficits as they have in the past and expect to win again in future elections, so they’re left with only one choice: “reform” the tax code so it collects the same or more revenue and sell it as a tax cut.

That’s not to say it’s going to work. Federal tax revenue will likely decrease overall under their plan, despite their efforts to raise taxes on some people while cutting them for others. But Republicans can ignore reality as well as Democrats when they need to. If you doubt that, ask any ten Republicans at random if the government got bigger or smaller while Reagan was president.

Republicans are also virtually identical to Democrats in their Marxist view of society.For Republicans, just like Democrats and communists, it is made up of different “classes” of people, competing with each other in a zero-sum game for pieces of a static, finite “pie.” This is explicit in their rhetoric about “tax cuts for the middle class” or the sublimely obtuse “working class” (doesn’t anyone generating an income, large or small, work?)

While it’s true the idea of classes in society predates Marx, it is his vision which dominates the tax code, most strikingly in its assumption there is some fundamental difference between employees of going concerns and owners.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Why Are We Thanking the Troops for Disastrous Wars Like Iraq?

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Veterans-Day-2016 Another Veteran’s Day has come and gone, with the usual high fives all around for anyone who has ever donned a U.S. military uniform. The holiday falling on a Friday this year meant the pro-military sentiments generally lasted throughout the weekend at sporting events and other public gatherings. As always, the ubiquitous mantra from every corner of the republic was, “Thank the troops.”

Sooner or later, somebody has to ask: For what?

The general answer is for the great sacrifices the troops have made to defend freedom. But when was the last time any American’s freedom was in jeopardy from an external threat? Would any American be less free if the U.S. did not invade Afghanistan or Iraq? Vietnam? Deep down, everyone knows Americans aren’t freer because of these wars. So, why do we keep talking like they are?

Let’s take the two wars virtually everyone, across the political spectrum, agree were mistakes: Iraq and Vietnam. It turns out there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no “domino effect” after Vietnam, even though the mission there was unsuccessful. The communists did take over the country, but Asia and eventually the rest of the world did not fall to communism afterwards. On the contrary, once we stopped fighting them, the Vietnamese had the good sense to abandon communism relatively quickly after we left. Today, they are a major trading partner.

So, neither of these wars benefited the people who paid for them. In fact, American taxpayers and just about everyone else on the planet would have been far better off if neither had been fought at all.

To preempt hysteria in the comments section, no, the men and women in uniform don’t decide which wars they fight and where they are deployed. Fine. But just because the soldiers shouldn’t be blamed for the war, it doesn’t necessarily follow they should be thanked for it, either. If you’re talking to a friend at a cocktail party and a drunken guest bumps him, causing him to spill his drink on your suit, you may not blame your friend for ruining your suit. But would you thank him for it?

Read the rest at HuffPost…

An Extended Tax Reform Debate Will Subject Us to the Usual Absurdities

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John McCain’s confirmation he’d vote against the House tax reform bill as currently proposed means Republicans won’t be able to lower taxes – for some people – nearly as quickly as most of them want to. In all, three Republican senators have indicated their unwillingness to vote for the plan, meaning Republicans would need Democratic votes to get it through.

As Democratic support is unlikely, the American public will have to endure several weeks or months of grandstanding, proposed amendments, and further neutering of any real benefit to taxpayers. The worst thing about these rituals is they are always largely a debate over absurdities. Here are just a few of the perennial favorites.

Over Ten Years

Both sides of any tax and spending debate use the “over ten years” canard. Those politicians claiming their plan will “balance the budget” claim their bill will do so in ten years, always after increasing spending this year. Those opposing the same plan will pick out spending lines they don’t like, whether increases, decreases, or new spending, and use the ten-year canard to make the impact seem bigger than it is.

For example, if Republicans proposed cutting $100 billion from domestic spending (a mere 2.5% of the overall federal budget), Democrats would wail Republicans were depriving the public of $1 trillion of desperately needed services. Republicans would claim they were saving taxpayers $1 trillion. Neither side would acknowledge the $1 trillion is a rather small percentage of the ten-year federal budget.

In reality, Congress has no power to pass any bill that can’t be changed in as little as two years. Spending bills are debated every year. So, anything politicians say and the media parrot regarding a spending bill’s effects over the next ten years is largely hot air. All that really matters is what their proposals will do next year. And that news is virtually never good.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Newsweek: Trump’s Tax Reform is Aimed at Punishing Democratic Voters

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dmoe voters On October 19, Republicans passed the first $4 trillion federal budget in U.S. history, a version of which narrowly passed the House on Thursday.

At $4.1 trillion, the budget represents an approximately 5 percent increase in spending over the last fiscal year of the Obama administration and sets the stage for President Trump to do what every GOP president has done since WWII: increase spending far more than did his Democratic predecessor.

Simple arithmetic will tell you that if spending increases, either taxes or deficits must increase, too. But although the GOP has been happy to let deficits explode in the past, they will have a harder time defending them this time around after their eight-year assault on Obama’s deficits, which increased debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion.

Therefore, Republicans are going to have to raise taxes to avoid bigger deficits.

They have set out to do exactly that to their political opponents while cutting taxes for their supporters.

All of this makes their current narrative about eliminating the state and local deduction from federal tax liability especially unseemly.

They claim the deductions force low tax states to subsidize high tax states like California, but that’s not true. California and New York pay more in federal taxes than they reap in federal benefits.

That isn’t to defend the egregious taxation in states like New York. But as Republicans love to remind us, the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans pay most of the income taxes and most of those people live in blue states Republicans are targeting for effective tax hikes.

Read the rest in Newsweek…

Big-Spending Republicans Seek Tax Hikes on Blue States

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taxincreasesign Ten days ago, Republicans passed the first $4 trillion federal budget in U.S. history, a version of which narrowly passed the House on Thursday. At $4.1 trillion, the budget represents an approximately 5% increase in spending over the last fiscal year of the Obama administration and sets the stage for President Trump to do what every GOP president has done since WWII: increase spending far more than did his Democratic predecessor.

A History of Spending Increases

Therefore, Republicans are going to have to raise taxes to avoid bigger deficits. They have set out to do exactly that to their political opponents while cutting taxes for their supporters. All of this makes their current narrative about eliminating the state and local deduction from federal tax liability especially unseemly. They claim the deductions force low tax states to subsidize high tax states like California, but that’s not true. California and New York pay more in federal taxes than they reap in federal benefits.

That isn’t to defend the egregious taxation in states like New York. But as Republicans love to remind us, the wealthiest 20% of Americans pay most of the income taxes and most of those people live in blue states Republicans are targeting for effective tax hikes. To raise spending by $200 billion and then claim the moral high ground based on fake news is exasperating even by Washington’s standards.

Read the rest at Foundation for Economic Education…

Newsweek: As Congress and Trump Grind to a Halt, the Government Rumbles On

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gettyimages-642093036 Newsweek

Donald Trump in the East Room at the White House on February 16, 2017 in Washington, DC.MARIO TAMA/GETTY

President Trump spent the weekend embroiled in yet another Twitter skirmish, this time with retiring Republican Senator Bob Corker. Trump may even have suffered a rare defeat on his own turf, based on Corker’s hilarious rejoinder about someone missing their daycare shift at the White House. If Trump has a soul, even he laughed at that one.

But many blame this kind of drama as a major contributing reason to Trump “not getting anything done” so far during the first year of his presidency. Even those on the blood-in-their-eyes, Trump-hating left make this criticism. One would think they’d be glad he’s not getting anything done, but apparently, a government not doing anything is even worse for them than one doing things they don’t like.

If only “not getting anything done” were true. The Pentagon goes on waging war, uninterrupted by elections, supposed gridlock, or even “government shutdowns.” War has become the normal state, with “an act of Congress” required to stop it, rather than start it.

Domestically, all of Washington’s unconstitutional regulatory agencies have hummed along without pause. The FDA is still driving up prescription drug prices by keeping thousands of generics off the market. The TSA is still violating the 4th Amendment millions of times per day while virtually never discovering dangerous items brought on board, even during their own tests. And the Social Security Administration goes on cutting checks as if it didn’t have tens of trillions in unfunded liabilities.

Read the rest at Newsweek…