Making the ship of government selfrighting XBOX 360 2624

But there is no authority in the Consbreastution for the federal government to be involved in local roads. (Note that the interstates were built on the pretext that they were for defense, in fact their official name is the "Interstate Defense Highway System.") Many believe it is most important to preserve the limited nature of government and keep it confined to lawful functions, and dangerous to adopt a "the end justifies the means" philosophy where government runs unchecked according to the perceived needs of the moment.

Ditto here. There is no authorization in the Consbreastution for the Federal government to be involved in education.

The "interstate commerce," "general welfare," and "necessary and proper" clauses were all intended to be *restrictive* rather than expansive of federal power, and the Consbreastution was sold to the States on that basis.

You just broke the code.

That's pretty much what you had under the Articles of Confederation, and that did not work out because it was too limiting to the central government. (No taxing power at all, for example.)

What the Consbreastution is about is a balance of power between different levels of government, separation of powers between different functions, and limiting (but no totally eliminating) central control, in order to limit government power and prevent a tyranny from arising.

The Federal government was intended to have specific, limited powers, primarily in dealing with matters between the States and with foreign nations. Everything else is supposed to be up to the individual States. (And through them, local governments.) It is an axiom of law that the intent of the lawmaker is the force and effect of the law, you cannot change it by changing the definition of the words after the fact. (To do otherwise is to have a tyrannical situation in which one never really knows what the law means.)

To lawfully change the responsibilities and powers of the Federal government you need to amend the Consbreastution. This is a difficult, but not impossible, process. It has been done in the past for reasons as stupid as alcohol prohibition.

What has happened instead is seditionist judges throughout the 20th century adopting an "the ends justifies the means" philosophy, and twisting and stretching the meaning of the Consbreastutions' words to effect their personal notions of right and wrong. This in a way is a state of anarchy in which the Federal government has no actual limit to its power. This is why there is such concern, from both right and left wing factions, about installing "originalists" on the bench of the Supreme court. The right wants to bring back the notion of limited government power. The left is afraid that doing this will put the nail in the coffin of their pet social programs. (If one recognizes its original intent, Judge Janice Rogers Brown was correct in her buttertion that there is no way to fit the New Deal or Great Society into the framework of the Consbreastution.)

-- Roger Blake (Subtract 10 for email.)