Constitutional Observance

By John R Beckman

The following is a presentation I gave originally on 9-13-2003 in honor of our Constitution. I have since repeated this on several other worthy occasions.

Constitutionalism + "A Government in which power is distributed and limited by a system of laws that must be obeyed by the rulers." + Webster's

"A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either."
--Thomas Paine

One year after the drafting of the constitution eleven of the thirteen colonies had ratified the constitution and thereby the United States Federal Government was created. The States of America had created a Federal Government.

In the year 2003 do we still have a constitution that would be recognized by any of the men who signed our constitution on September 17, 1787?

Article 1 of the constitution outlines the legislative powers granted to the Federal Government. Here are some examples of how those powers have changed since 1787.

Article 1, Section 1, Paragraph 1, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives."

Lawmaking authority and enforcement has been delegated to EPA, DEA, BATF, FCC, FAA, and several dozen more non-representative agencies. Our elected representatives no longer make the rules and regulations that govern our lives they are now made by faceless bureaucrats who have secure civil service positions and who are not accountable to the people. In the most recent examples of usurpation of legislative authority the FCC recently approved regulations allowing up to 45% of a media market to be owned by one entity.

Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3, "Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers,..."

Eradicated by the 16th Amendment in 1913, allowing for Income Tax.

Article 1, Section 3, Paragraph 1, "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years;..."

Eradicated by the 17th Amendment in 1913, thus making the election of U.S. Senators based on the principles of an at large election by the people. Congressmen are supposed to be close to the people and responsive to the people. Senators are supposed to be slightly more removed from the whims of the masses. This was a protection put in place by the founders to protect us from shortsighted immediate gains and feel good ideas that come out of a frenzied mob mentality. The Senate, being elected by state legislatures also would be more protective of states rights. The 17th Amendment took away one of the few effective means of protecting the rights of individual states.

Article 1, Section 9, LIMITATIONS ON POWERS GRANTED TO THE UNITED STATES, Paragraph 4, "No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration hereinbefore directed to be taken."

Eradicated by the 16th Amendment in 1913, allowing for Income Tax.

This one is similar to Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3.

One of the most contentious issues between the colonists and England was taxation. The prohibition on non-proportional taxation is mentioned twice within Article 1 of the Constitution. By that you may infer that the framers of the constitution believed a non-proportional tax to be an especially egregious act by government.

-Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation-- "But with the adoption of the income-tax amendment in 1913, the amount of money people retained as their own became totally subject to the will of the government. Congress might set the percentage high or low, but that wasn't really the point. The point was that by granting public officials the unfettered power to determine the percentage of income tax, government became the determiner of how much of their income people would be permitted to keep. The Sixteenth Amendment effectively nationalized people's income and placed them on a government allowance."

--Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow at the national center for policy analysis-- "Throughout most of American history, taxes were levied principally on consumption, rather than income. Except during the Civil War, the federal government was financed almost entirely by import duties and excise taxes until 1913, when our current income tax was imposed. The Founding Fathers favored consumption taxes in part because they are harder to raise to confiscatory levels than incomes taxes. ...Experience shows that general sales tax rates much above 10 percent are very hard to collect. They encourage smuggling, black markets, evasion, production for personal use, substitution for untaxed commodities and other activities that erode the tax base. Thus, confining taxation to a form that is inherently hard to raise to excessive levels meant that the size of government would be severely limited."

Let's step back a minute. In 1787 when the states created a federal government what did they expect the federal government would do? How would the newly created federal government spend money?

what is a proper government expenditure?

To establish justice + insure domestic tranquility + provide for the common defense + promote the general welfare + and secure the blessings of liberty.

In the book "The life of Colonel David Crockett" by Edward Ellis, a story is re-told about an encounter that U.S. Congressman David Crockett had with a constituent. This constituent said that he would no longer vote for Congressman Crockett because in the previous year Crockett had voted for $20,000 to be used to help the victims of a large fire in Georgetown where dozens of families lost their homes. Crockett argued that a nation as rich as America should take care of its women and children. But the constituent argued that it is not the amount or the cause that matters but the principle of government charity. Is it proper for government to participate in charity?

--P.J. O'Rourke, The Cato Institute's Mencken Research Fellow "There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as caring and sensitive because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he is willing to do good with others people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he will do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head."

+James Madison "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents...."

--President Franklin Pierce "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity, [such spending] would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."

--President Grover Cleveland "I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. .. I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."

What has happened to our men of this understanding?

With the loss of this understanding of the constitution we have turned into an entitlement society. A society of people who believe they deserve something from the government.

--Alexander Fraser Tytler, Professor of History at Edinburgh University and author of "The decline and fall of the Athenian Republic", written in 1776 "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, followed always by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years."

How does this effect manifest itself? Are we heading down this path?

Alexander Fraser Tytler stated the natural evolution of a democracy:

From Bondage to Spiritual Faith
From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Courage to Liberty
From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Selfishness
From Selfishness to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back into Bondage" ................

At the beginning of the 20th century, federal taxes were equal to 3% of GDP and the entire tax code was only a few hundred pages. Now at 20% of GDP and 46,000 pages (481 separate tax forms), Americans will spend 6.1 billion hours complying with the code. Due to the code's complexity, more than half of filers will pay for "professional preparation" of their taxes (up from only 20% in 1960) at a cost of more than $200 billion -- almost 10% of what the IRS actually collects. "From its beginnings as a simple, two-page form in 1913, the income tax has grown into a monstrosity because politicians have been unable to resist the temptation to use it for political purposes," according to taxation expert Daniel M. Mitchell. "No longer are taxes merely the means to raise revenue. They have become the tools politicians use to pursue social engineering, backdoor industrial policy and ham-fisted attempts to steer private behavior with subsidies and penalties. And what is the result after 87 years of letting politicians and lobbyists run amok? A tax code nobody can understand. When Money magazine sent a hypothetical family's tax return to professional tax-preparers in 1998, they got back 46 different responses, every one of them wrong."+ National Review

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill notes, "There is a constituency in the Congress that sees the tax code as a way to do favors for people which is a way to get elected that's not as obvious as actually writing them a check from the American people."

The Border Patrol Annual Budget: Number of Agents: 10,551 $1.5 billion (FY 2002)

The F.B.I. Annual Budget: Number of Special Agents: 12,582 $4.2 billion (FY 2002)

The Internal Revenue Service: Number of Employees: 99,887 Annual Budget $9.4 billion (FY 2002)

The Federal Government has 7 times as many people working to take your money from you as they have protecting you from criminals, and 9 times as many people as they have protecting your borders.