Contempt for Constitutional Limitations on the Federal Government

The following is from Tom Woods fabulous book:
Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21^st Century.

“The controversy over health care reflects a much broader and deeper constitutional void in American life.  Some fifteen years ago, a Supreme Court Justice asked the United States Solicitor General ( the government’s lawyer for Supreme Court cases ) if he could name an activity or program that, in his view, would fall outside the bounds of what the Constitution authorized the federal government to do.  He could not.

This contempt for constitutional limitations on the federal government is bipartisan and long-standing.  Unsurprisingly, when the Constitution is thought of not as the strict limitation on government that its original supporters sold it as, but as something so completely broad as almost to defy limitation, government will continue to grow.  Some federal activities have begun to alarm even those who have historically cheered government growth as a progressive force.  Yet nothing has been able to stop it.  Even Ronald Reagan, for all his charisma and rhetorical prowess, was able only to slow the growth of certain categories of federal spending.  In 1994, the Republican Party won control of both house of Congress in a historic off-year election victory.  Government would at last be shrunk, politicians assured us.

Sure it would!

More and more Americans concerned about ongoing and apparently unstoppable government growth are beginning to wonder if some other strategy should be pursued, the exclusively electoral one having been such a failure.  In the face of decades of broken promises and precious few victories against the the seemingly inexorable federal advance, the pretty speeches of the plastic men are starting to ring hollow.

This is the spirit in which the Jeffersonian remedy of state interposition or nullification is once again being pursued”.

Tags: Nullification, Tom Woods