For anyone desiring to understand why our government, debt, and society are out of control, last night’s SOTU was an excellent primer.
As far as I could tell, everything promised or demanded by the yelling angry old man is a violation of the Constitution’s enumerated powers, or just plain illegal.
The “enumerated powers” are the powers the superior states delegated to the inferior federal government when they created it to do specific stuff FOR THE STATES.
Ours is referred to as a “government of limited powers” because its powers are limited to those enumerated in Article 1, Section 8.
And no more.
The idiots and the ignorant will, like AG Garland, yammer about the “Supremacy Clause.” Of course this applies - ONLY - when a conflict arises between a state and the Feds regarding an enumerated power; otherwise we would have a government of unlimited powers - which, obviously, is what the uniparty, but particularly the Dems, want and demand.
Education spending and student loan forgiveness? This will buy a lot of votes from the irresponsible, but neither is within the authority of the federal government.
Money for Ukraine? No authority was delegated to the Feds for foreign aid. None.
Sending our troops to build a pier in Gaza? No foundation whatsoever.
When those troops wind up in combat, as they will, no Declaration of War will have been passed by congress, the required Constitutional precursor to sending American troops to fight and die, which we have idiotically ignored since 1950. And, no, the Constitution has no substitute of an AUMF instead of a Declaration; an AUMF is only a fool’s escape from responsibility.
“Ensuring” our elections? Straight up violation of Article 1; the federal government has no role whatsoever in elections.
The border? Seriously? We HAVE an immigration law. It was written by Ted Kennedy, the “Liberal Lion of the Senate,” passed and signed decades ago. The role of the president is to ensure that “the laws are faithfully executed.”
The old man refusing to enforce the law is in violation of that oath and is breaking the law thousands of times every single day. And I’m not at all interested in the nonsense that “immigration law is broken.” If we’ve never even tried to enforce it, how would we know? Even if it is “broken,” it’s still the law. When under the rule of law, you enforce the law until you change it, and then you enforce the new law. Not enforcing laws because some officeholder doesn’t want to is totalitarian.
Sending money to increase police forces arguably is the most problematic. First of all, “General Police Powers” are reserved, not delegated. No foundation at all exists for the Feds to do policing. FBI, ATF, IRS “enforcement,” federal prisons, etc., all are usurpations of state authority, violations of the Tenth Amendment, and, when executed by the executive branch, violations of the president’s oath of office. As the oath is a requirement of office, violating it makes him ineligible for that office.
He yelled about guns. Not only have the Feds no authority over civilian guns, they are explicitly prohibited from any authority over our guns. If they want to ban what they erroneously call “Assault Rifles,” they can amend the Constitution. Actual “Assault Rifles” can fire fully-automatic and have been illegal since 1934. Was that a questionable decision? You bet. But that’s not the current discussion.
Democrats are again making hay over abortion. They probably prevented the anticipated 2022 “Red Wave” because of Dobbs, a pure Tenth Amendment decision. Abortion not being among the enumerated powers, SCOTUS (a part of the federal government and so limited by the enumerated powers) had no constitutional authority to take on Roe in 1973.* (Also not among the enumerated powers: marriage, sports, bathrooms, pronouns...)
Why did Roe become such a problem, making half of the electorate single-issue voters?
For the same reason the Feds are completely out of control, our cities are unsafe, our border wide-open, and 100,000 Americans are killed by fentanyl annually.
Governors have been refusing their responsibility for decades.
Rather than doing their jobs, which very much include keeping a tight rein on the Feds, they all think they’re in Triple-A, awaiting a call-up to The Show. Rather than acting in the interests of the Constitution and rule of law, and ensuring the safety and prosperity of their citizens, they let the Feds run wild.
THAT is why America is in a ditch.
Following Roe, governors whose citizens opposed abortion ought to have rejected Roe and told SCOTUS they lacked jurisdiction outside the enumerated powers, and abortion isn’t among them. The Court has no enforcement authority and because, as noted above, the feds have no policing authority (ie any state can just arrest any federal police employee because that employee is in violation of the Tenth Amendment) what could the Feds have done had any state continued to outlaw abortion and, pointing to the enumerated powers, told the Feds to piss up a rope? Nothing legal or Constitutional…
The angry old man last night promised to redistribute more state tax dollars to blue metros to control blue crime. Why taxpayers in Moline should pay for the decisions of voters in Chicago or Manhattan was left unsaid, as was the foundation for the Feds to involve themselves in policing.
In the same vein, I’ve long been interested in “federal” money spent on state infrastructure. I used to live in SoCal and recall the rebuilding / upgrading of road, rail and harbor facilities for the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. Why citizens of Houston, Miami, Seattle, etc., were paying for ports competing with them and their own jobs was and is beyond me.
If a state wants to improve its competitiveness, that state should pay for it.
Overall, America will not return to the rule of law, to constitutional government, to a federal (NOT “national”) government of limited powers until and unless governors step up and do the jobs we elect them to do. Most importantly among their job is ensuring the Feds stay in their box.
*I must admit to finding the anti-abortion position of the GOP, a party pretending to support individual liberty, more than a bit problematic, and not for purely philosophical reasons. In 2008, I ran the numbers. IIRC, we had had about 73M abortions by then. If one assumes a 49% female birth, and that 75% of kids vote as do their parents, and the then-approximate total fertility rate of 2.1, then the 2020 election (would have) had about 20M fewer D voters than had Roe not happened. Why any sane person wants 20M more Ds destroying America is beyond me. But the anti-abortion cohort, unfortunately like most people today, seems incapable of second-order thinking…
As time goes by it becomes abundently clear that we are heading for tough times. Our presumed President appeared as an angry old man. No one can deny that. To me he also behaved as a drug addict would- craving his next fix. I suggest that folks begin to get themselves in gear and prepare for the worst....whatever that may mean. I know what it means for me.