The Importance of the 10th Amendment

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics:

This past weekend, ABC News held a debate between George Will and Paul Ryan on one side, and Barney Frank and Robert Reich on the other, during which they argued over whether our government was too large and intrusive. The focus of the discussion was on the role of the federal government in Washington. By omitting any discussion of state and local governments, they impliedly equated the role of all government with the role of the federal government. This debate, though intelligent and interesting, appeared to ignore the real debate that is raging outside of Washington over the size and role of government.

There are two major concerns that have been percolating among voters over the size and role of government, especially among those who embraced the Tea Party movement in 2009. These concerns can be distilled as follows:

• Too much responsibility and power have shifted to Washington from individuals, local governments and state governments, which is contrary to the proper allocation of responsibilities under the Constitution, and which has created tremendous economic inefficiencies for, and imposed artificial costs on, society; and
• All levels of government—local, state, and national—have been operated without a proper focus on their primary responsibilities, and have been managed inefficiently and too expensively, which has caused them to incur an unsustainable debt burden to fund their operations.

Citizens now see that the net impact of these developments has been

• a transfer of power and revenue to the federal government with a commensurate reduction of individual liberty and wealth, and
• the creation of an unsustainable tax and debt burden for future generations.

Our neighbors want politicians who will address these concerns now and take the bold actions to fix them—not just manage them better. It is in this context that so many people have responded positively to the conservative argument to re-invigorate and apply the principles contained in the 10^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which has been championed by Rick Perry and others.

For a guy like me, who studied Constitutional Law in the early 1980s, this new embrace of the 10^th Amendment is remarkable. Back then, the overwhelming view of the 10^th Amendment (and the 9^th Amendment, too) was that it was merely “surplusage” or a “truism”, which provided no real limit to the responsibility of the post-New Deal federal government. To understand this view, let’s look at the actual language of two constitutional provisions—the 10^th Amendment and the “Necessary and Proper Clause” of Article I, Section 8:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
******
The Congress shall have Power … To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

By the early 1980s, so many responsibilities and powers had been usurped by Congress, the President and the federal bureaucracy under Congress’ expanded application of the Necessary and Proper Clause (which was blessed by the Supreme Court), that the 10^th Amendment was viewed as simply recognizing that whatever power Congress had chosen not to usurp remained within the responsibility of the States or the people to exercise. Such an interpretation willfully ignored the concept of Federalism underlying the Constitution, and no longer provided any limitation on the power of the federal government.

In fact, judicial interpretations actually created a perversity of the Necessary and Proper power: as Congress broadened its authority, it expanded the scope of what was necessary and proper to exercise that authority; which, in turn, broadened the federal government’s authority into new areas of responsibility and, thus, broadened the scope of what was necessary and proper to exercise such new authority. It is this continuing and expanding spiral that has led the federal government to exercise the power to do things like regulate all forms of local economic development to protect the life of a local lizard or frog, as well as to underwrite our health and retirements.

Now it is true that the power of the federal government to legislate actually is a little broader than what is just necessary and proper to implement or enforce the responsibilities listed in Article I, Section 8. The specific list of responsibilities in that section are—

• to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; …
• to borrow Money on the credit of the United States;
• to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;
• to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,
• [to establish] uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States;
• to coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;
• to provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;
• to establish Post Offices and post Roads;
• to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
• to constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court;
• to define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;
• to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
• to raise and support Armies, …
• to provide and maintain a Navy;
• to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;
• to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
• to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; [and]
• to exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings.

In addition to Article I, Section 8, the original text of the Constitution vests other powers in the federal government that Congress can pass laws to effectuate the following:

• to establish rules for its own procedures;
• to make or alter laws regulating the election of Senators and Representatives;
• to suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus in cases of rebellion or invasion;
• to publish a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of public funds;
• to approve the receipt of any award by a citizen from a foreign government;
• to allow States to impose certain taxes on the movement of goods in commerce;
• to allow for States to keep a defense establishment in a time of peace;
• to provide for the conduct of the Executive functions outlined in Article II;
• to establish the scope of jurisdiction of the federal courts beyond the enumerated issues in Article III;
• to establish the place for federal criminal trials;
• to establish the punishment for treason;
• to proscribe the manner by which States may provide full faith and credit to the laws of other States;
• to allow States to form Compacts;
• to admit new States to the Union;
• to regulate Territories and other property of the Union;
• to guarantee a Republican form of government to every State; and
• to protect the States from domestic violence or invasion.

Finally, amendments to the Constitution have given these additional responsibilities to Congress since 1789:

• to prohibit slavery;
• to protect individual rights to due process and equal protection of the laws, and to the privilege and immunities of citizenship;
• to allow Confederates to have full citizenship;
• to lay income taxes;
• to provide for and protect the right to vote for former slaves, women, and 18-20 year-olds, and against poll-taxes;
• to provide for rules as to who will serve as President if no one qualifies to serve as President or Vice-President, or if those who would qualify would have died, by the time a Presidential term should start; and
• to allow for the appointment of Electors from the District of Columbia to serve in the Electoral College to elect the President and Vice-President.

Now, I don’t know about you, but, though these lists appear to be long, the listed powers are really pretty narrow and specific, which is consistent with the concept of Federalism. The sphere of responsibility delegated to the federal government was to be very narrow and specific. The trust to exercise these specific responsibilities were, in turn, vested in a group of representatives, while, closer to home, the people would be more directly involved in the politics of their States and communities where most of the work of government would continue to be done.

Not only did this allocation of responsibility protect and preserve the rights and obligations we call “liberty,” it also made profound economic sense. The specific allocation of the listed responsibilities to the federal government controlled the transaction and administrative costs associated with the operation of government, by reserving most governmental responsibility to local and state governments that could exercise those responsibilities with less bureaucracy and cost. Those activities closest to home—like providing for schools, roads, public safety, public hospitals and clinics, and community support—would be paid for and regulated through local and state governments in coordination with private organizations in each community. One government, one agency, and one bureaucracy would be needed to address each responsibility at each level.

But in today’s world, local and state governments have lost focus and fiscal discipline as the federal government has usurped their responsibilities (and while the federal government fails to perform its proper responsibilities effectively or efficiently). We now have multiple agencies and bureaucracies at each level of government, which overlap in responsibility and power. They each absorb scarce tax dollars to provide these redundant activities; the resulting redundant policies and enforcements often conflict; and the redundant bureaucracies often end up doing nothing because the bureaucrats assume another agency is addressing the problem. Add on to these layers of inefficiency the cost and inefficiency of redundant programs within each level of government (and a trend toward increasing salaries and benefits of public employees to a level that exceeds the level of private sector benefits), and you have the seeds of our current fiscal mess at all levels of government.

Therefore, resurrecting the 10^th Amendment is the natural first step to not only restoring the proper balance of power to protect our liberty, it also is the natural first step toward restoring fiscal sanity to government. But restoring this balance does not set-up the false choice that the debaters on ABC’s program seemed to be discussing—the false choice of government v. no-government. Under a proper application of the 10^th Amendment there will be government, there will be schools, there will be roads, there will be public safety, there will be public hospitals and clinics, and there will be help to those in our communities who need it—but those activities will return where they belong: to responsibility of the State and local governments, and to the people to provide. This re-balanced approach to government should produce less and more cost-effective government in the long-term, but it will not eradicate government—as progressives fear and libertarians hope.

The challenge to conservatives will be to commit to engage in the new balance that will arise if we are successful in resurrecting the 10^th Amendment. This new balance only will work if we individually engage and participate in the operation and oversight of our school districts, our cities, and our state to fix the fiscal messes they face, to hold our local elected officials accountable to re-focus their efforts on those responsibilities they should be exercising, to require that those functions be performed cost-effectively, and to participate in the private organizations that will be needed to help provide certain services in our communities.

If we don’t accept these responsibilities, then our demand for a return to the principles of the 10^th Amendment will be empty, and the vacuum eventually will be re-filled by those who want to centralize all power, responsibility and revenue in Washington.

The Lesson We Should Learn From The Civil War

This column originally appeared at Big Jolly Politics.

This month, 150 years ago, the Civil War, or “War Between the States,” began with the attack on Fort Sumter, South Carolina. This month, 146 years ago, that War on the battlefield ended with the fall of Richmond, and the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse (though the military and political occupation of the states that had formed the Confederacy would continue for another 11 years). In between those two Aprils in the 1861 and 1865, on a cold and overcast day in November, 1863, President Lincoln crystallized the purpose for which the War would be fought to a conclusion:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.…

----------

…It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…

----------

– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom

----------

– and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Over the last few weeks several pundits have been wringing their hands over a renewed debate over the cause of the Civil War: was it state’s rights, was it slavery, or was it something else altogether? Moreover, the perennial debates have re-emerged over the propriety of flying a version of the flag of the Confederacy in public places. Most of the pundits seem to be chastising Americans who don’t seem to “get it” that the War was about slavery, and these same editorialists continue to froth at the mouth over the sight of the Stars and Bars.

I have a slightly different take on all of this that I’d like to share with you, and which I hope will add to mix of thoughts we consider as the nation’s Sesquicentennial of the Civil War starts its four-year observance.

I want to start by sharing an observation that would not have been accurate when I first came to Texas as a young man 31 years ago: the Civil War is finally over. Some time over these last three decades we stopped looking at each other with distrust or disdain while asking “where are your from;” we stopped celebrating a holiday for Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and, instead, began celebrating a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr., and universally celebrating Memorial Day; the party of Lincoln became the dominant political force in Dixie and selected a Chairman who was African-American; and we have elected an African-American as President of the United States.

For those people younger than 40 who grew-up as the final social remnants of this War faded from our habits and customs, it is hard to appreciate how miraculous this development really has been. For many of us who trace the roots of our family trees to the United States that exited before 1860, our family histories and heir-looms often include cherished stories and artifacts from the War, while for some those histories and heir-looms remind us of a darker, more painful memory of our failure to live up to our ideals. The collective memory fueled by these family histories helped continue habits and customs of regional, social, political, and racial animosities for generations—but which now seem so odd that they are truly hard to explain to young people today.

I was blessed to grow-up learning a very balanced story of the War. My ancestors fought on both sides of the War, and I grew-up with stories and heir-looms from both sides of the conflict. But I also grew-up in the region of Central Illinois, where Lincoln rode the circuit, and where he and Douglas debated in 1858. Surrounded by Lincoln’s memory, we were taught that, although the Confederacy had better generals and military strategy, and defended arguably correct interpretations of the Constitution and the law as it existed at that time, the purpose of the War described that day in Gettysburg by Lincoln, and the ultimate preservation of our nation that resulted from the War, were just and right.

Somehow, after all these generations, we have learned to retain a pride in the heritage of our families and communities, while at long last putting aside the animosities that we held for so long. Now, for all but a few diehards, we share a belief that preserving the nation and its founding ideals, and working to make those ideals a reality for all men and women who call themselves Americans, was just and right.

But to acknowledge all of these developments doesn’t mean that we have stopped thinking—or should ever stop thinking—about what caused that War, because those underlying causes are deeply imbedded in the continuing American experience:

* The division of our governmental responsibilities between states and the federal government;

* The different influences that the vast and varied geography spanning North America continue to have on regional and national economics and politics;

* The central influence that religion has played in developing our national character and shaping public debates;

* The ambition to create one people out of settlers and immigrants from every corner of the globe, and to equally protect the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of each individual; and

* The restlessness of spirit that liberty agitates.

By the 1840s, the institution of slavery had become the catalyst by which each of these causes combined to tear the country apart.

Although Americans have always shared a restless spirit, the 15 years that preceded the War may have been the most restless in our history. Our borders expanded through war and annexation to include what is now the entire Continental United States. New territories were being formed and settled, and new states admitted into the Union. America began to absorb one of the first great waves of European immigration due to drought, famine and revolution. Gold was discovered in California, which caused the greatest internal migration the country has ever experienced, and which invited immigration from across the Pacific, all of which would keep parts of California in a state of violent turmoil until the start of the War. The opposition Whig party would disintegrate into several factions arguing over the political impact of these issues, and slavery, and would eventually lead to the formation of a wholly new political party by the mid-1850s—the Republican Party. Central to all of these phenomena was the question of what to do about the institution of slavery.

By the 1840s the continuation of slavery was being challenged throughout the Western World, but it truly was coming into stark contrast with America’s ideals. However, no one quite knew whether and how a society could last that was not based on, and run by a homogeneous race, ethnicity, clan, tribe, or religion. Even the most enlightened thinkers of the day were pessimistic that a society could be maintained among people of different races (let alone people of different races who also came from different ethnic groups, clans, tribes and/or religious traditions) largely because it simply had never been tried or accomplished by any other society. This question impacted not only the debate about slavery, but also the fierce debate over immigration during the 1850s.

Throughout the political and economic debate over slavery, religious leaders were on both sides of the issue, created religious teachings to support each side, and lent a tone of moral fervor to each side’s hardening positions. These hardened positions split denominations and congregations, as well as communities.

The differences in climate and geography between the North and the South had created completely different economies and societies. Slavery was not just a moral and political issue, it was an issue that impacted the credit and solvency of the entire region, because slaves were used as collateral for credit throughout the South. The Southern economy, in turn, perpetuated plantations, small farms and small towns, while the North had begun its development of larger farms and urbanization based on a free-market for labor. By the end of the 1850s, though, the economics of slavery was beginning to unravel due to prolonged droughts in Europe and the development of high-yield cotton production in Egypt, which made Iowa farm products more valuable to our trading partners—and to our nation’s diplomacy—than Southern cotton.

The imbalance between the power of the states and the federal government prohibited the federal government from crafting a national solution to slavery. Time after time, Congress had attempted to reach compromises that addressed the slavery issue, but each time the compromises failed or were overturned by the Courts. Finally, the infamous Dredd Scott decision clarified for all that the national government lacked the power to address an issue that crossed state lines and was of national importance—the institution of slavery.

By the eve of the 1860 election, all of these causes of division between the North and the South became entangled with the issue of slavery. To glibly say that any one of the causes of division can be separated from the issue of slavery as the “cause” of the War is as wrong as saying that “slavery” was the only cause of the War. All of these problems came together over slavery to bring about the War, and “slavery” had to be resolved in order to address the underlying divisions that caused the regional conflict and end the War.

Slavery officially ended with the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution immediately after the military conflict ended, but resolving the underlying divisions took more than 100 years. Moreover, the causes of those divisions still roil our national debates today, and probably will for as long as there is an America. For instance:

* though we have expanded the scope of the power of the federal government 9 times by amendment, we still desire a limited federal government and debate the correct balance of local versus state versus federal authority;

* though mass media, mass production, and mass migration have reduced our regional economic and political differences, geography and history still combine to produce different regional viewpoints and activities that affect the nation;

* though race is no longer a source of religious dispute in this nation, the disciplines of our respective faiths still play a major role in the way we view the role of government and how we vote;

* though we have become the most heterogeneous society on Earth, we still struggle with how to assimilate new people into our nation and how to live by our ideals; and

* our desire to live as free people, and to develop our talents to their fullest potential, keep us restless and constantly in dynamic motion—both as individuals and as a society.

Rather than defend the public display of artifacts of a dispute long over—like flying the Stars and Bars over a government building—it is time to put those artifacts on our private shelves and get on with the continuing work of making our Founders’ vision work. Rather than continue to debate whether and how slavery helped cause the Civil War, we should recognize that slavery arose as the single issue that caused our divisions to become irreconcilable.

Then, we should commit to study and debate the tensions that will always exist in our society, and why, in the middle of the 1800s, they caused us to go to war with each other, in order to make sure that we never let that happen again. Through the learning that comes from such study and debate, we should gain the wisdom to never repeat that mistake.

Now that the Civil War is finally over, I hope that we start to gain such wisdom during this Sesquicentennial commemoration.