The Post & Email by William L. Kovacs 11/7/2023
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Part I: Fix a Government Too Big to Govern: Devolve Power to the States.]
As the spending minuet plays out between the House and Senate over appropriations, supplemental spending for wars, and government shutdowns, a wall of debt is being built around the Congress. With an estimated $45 trillion national debt by 2030 and interest payments exceeding a trillion a year, reality will force our lawmakers to stop spending. One of their first cuts will be to reduce and eventually eliminate the $1.2 trillion Congress gives to states as a bribe to operate federal programs that the federal government, many times, has no authority to operate. This occurrence will be the beginning of the devolution of power to the states.
How did the federal and state governments get into this bind? More importantly, how do they get out of debt?
The answer is clear, if it’s constitutional to increase federal power, it must also be constitutional to decrease it. This flexibility allows the federal government to return to the states the powers taken from them over the past eighty years. Devolution of power will be the linchpin that keeps a de facto bankrupt Union together.
The growth of the federal government has been the only unifying ambition of Congress, presidents, and the courts since the dawn of the Republic.
The expansion of federal power started with Chief Justice Marshall’s 1819 decision in McCulloch v. Maryland. Marshall not only solidified all the federal government’s enumerated powers; he broadly applied the ‘necessary and proper clause’ to establish sweeping implied and incidental federal powers. He indicated no phrase in the Constitution limits the use of these implied powers.
His decisions elevated the Supreme Court to being the final arbiter of constitutional issues. By skillfully combining the Constitution’s enumerated powers with its implied powers, Marshall designed a governing structure with few limits on federal power short of a revolution.
While the Supreme Court approved the accumulation of massive federal power early in the Republic, it took until the 1940s for the court to erase the Tenth Amendment and state powers from the Constitution.
The demise of the Tenth Amendment arose when the Department of Labor sought to regulate local wages. States argued wage regulation was not an enumerated federal power in the Constitution. Therefore, such power rested with the states. Unfortunately for the states, a unanimous Supreme Court in United States v Darby (1941) held the Tenth Amendment was merely a “truism” since the substance needs to be determined by what powers are delegated to the federal government from any part of the Constitution. In Darby, the court held the federal government has the constitutional authority to regulate local wages under the Commerce Clause.
More:
https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/11/07/national-debt-will-force-devolution-of-power-to-the-states/
