It isn’t well publicized how Congress became so dysfunctional. Even though this could easily be remedied through a Convention of States, serious study is required. Over time citizen freedoms were confiscated, often willingly, sometimes not.
Let’s investigate!
The United States was barely a decade-plus old when the first incident took place. As a trading nation, we renewed our relationship with England in spite of constant wars between European principalities.
At the time England was at war with France yet again. Fearing the French-English war spreading, U.S. concern resulted in the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by the U.S. Congress in 1798.
While these laws restricted foreign residents, they principally limited freedom of speech and press (Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendment, respectively). The Tenth Amendment scope was a background issue of concern yet to be addressed.
For the next 60 years, expansion activated the nation along with agitation on the Slavery issue. Constitutionally, slave importation was terminated by Article I, Section 9, in 1808. But the six hundred thousand slaves in the nation were mired in the southern agrarian economy with no freedom guarantee and none forthcoming.
President Van Buren’s federally employed workforce to mitigate against rash actions failed. The nation argued, fussed and shed blood through an 1820 Missouri Compromise, failure of the Wilmot Proviso, and Compromise of 1850 strengthening fugitive slave laws.
Further complicating the issue was a Justice Taney’s 1857 Supreme Court decision holding Dred Scott not free. The justices considered him not a person, but property. Neither justice nor citizenship was forthcoming for another 100 years, even after a bloody, five-year war, and in spite of the Thirteenth Amendment.
The degradation of freedom for all U.S. persons really starts in the 1890s with Progressivism’s rise and greater international involvement.
Woodrow Wilson promoted an administrative state, arguing modern times demanded government power be unified, centralized and expertly managed. He claimed the Constitution's checks and balances were outdated.
He absolutely trusted the wisdom of scientific disciplines and unquestioning ethical dedication of administrative “experts” and “academic intellectuals” to overcome founding-era qualms regarding concentrated power.
As for the Constitution, Wilson considered it like this:
“The trouble with the theory [of limited and divided government] is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.”
This is where the living and breathing constitution comes from. If humanity evolved, why not the U.S. Constitution?
“Enlightened and evolved humans” understood how to control human nature to produce utopian outcomes through an executive branch collection of humanely driven agencies exercising power, Wilson thought.
Government actions in creating direct taxation through the Sixteenth Amendment and making U.S. Senators representatives of the people through the Seventeenth Amendment ensured government control and overreach yet unfamiliar to citizens of this nation.
The outcomes Wilson advocated would never sustain a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
The New Deal authored by President Franklin D. Roosevelt manifested the “Administrative State” envisioned by Wilson. Under Roosevelt, a single political party controlled the federal government.
They created new federal agencies in the 1930s as part of the New Deal legislation, mushrooming the size of the “Administrative State” federal bureaucracy. The bureaucracies transcended the traditional boundaries of executive power, because they made both legislative and judicial decisions.
How did that work?
Congress acted to implement a system where governance structures are legislated. It produced the famous statement:
“We must first pass the law to understand what is in it.”
The framework is passed by Congress. The operating processes are fleshed out through binding regulations issued by assigned executive departments.
Immediately the “Administrative State” Departments exceeded their statutory authority, making them virtually unaccountable, and empowering them with judicial and legislative functions violating primary constitutional principles:
- separation of powers
- rule of law.
Today’s regulations are enforced by departmental authority and judicial structures, outside the judicial branch, beyond presidential control, and independent of political control.
Department programs grew the concept of the welfare state, under which the federal government (rather than individuals, municipalities, or the states) assumes the major responsibility for the well-being of the people.
What could a Convention of States do?
Check out the below ideas and consider how these would turn our dysfunctional government into the one the Founder’s envisioned which serves you:
- The public debt shall not be increased except upon a recorded vote of two-thirds of each house of Congress.
- Term limits on Congress
- Limiting federal overreach by returning the Commerce Clause to its original meaning, perverted by Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)
- Limiting the power of federal regulations by giving a congressional override.
- Review the process for a Convention of States under Article V.
- Understand the fallacy of a "runaway convention," the history of conventions, and the internal process a convention would follow.
- Engage people you know on the process and assist their understanding.
The wheel, here, is not being re-invented. It is being used for its intended purpose: to return freedom, fiscal responsibility, and limited government into your life for the better.
The worse is what we experience today.
