The Air Force is clearly unconstitutional. <\/p>\n
Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution gives the United States the power to \u201cTo provide and maintain a Navy\u201d and to \u201cTo raise and support Armies.\u201d The Marine Corps and the Coast Guard might be able to be justified as extensions of the Navy, but there\u2019s nothing in the Constitution about an Air Force. Not a word. It\u2019s clearly a socialist plot, no? Top Gun is obviously a Soviet propaganda film, and the fact that Tom Cruise is a Scientologist is just icing on the cake. <\/p>\n
Of course, common sense would dictate that since 18th Century aerial combat would likely have involved dropping big rocks from hot air balloons, there was really no constitutional consideration to provide for Top Gun-style combat. It\u2019s very unlikely that the framers had any intention of limiting the technological avenues of our military. Consequently, lawmakers have felt little or no pressure to amend the Constitution in order to grant themselves the power to pay military pilots to fly in F-14s. <\/p>\n
But if you\u2019re a Tea Partier, you have to recognize the intellectual contradictions that your worship of \u201coriginal intent\u201d is bound to create. <\/p>\n
Case in point: the recent health care reform law is coming under fire for being \u201cunconstitutional.\u201d Why? Well, it includes a mandate that everyone purchase health insurance or face government penalties. According to the Tea Party, nowhere in Article 1, Section 8 is there a provision allowing the Federal Government to force you to purchase \u201ca product you don\u2019t want,\u201d to quote Tea Party darling and Senator-elect Mike Lee of Utah. <\/p>\n
A product you don\u2019t want. Swell. <\/p>\n
So what can the government do, then? Well, according to the 16th Amendment, they can \u201clay and collect taxes,\u201d which they can use, with their Article 1, Section 8 authority, to \u201cregulate Commerce\u201d and do all that is \u201cnecessary and proper\u201d to do so. Given that health care is an international business and constitutes one-seventh of all of our economic commerce, it\u2019s pretty hard to argue that the commerce clause gives the government no power to intervene. (That\u2019s still what the Tea Partiers argue, but over a century of precedent makes their case untenable.) <\/p>\n
So rather than force you to purchase \u201ca product you don\u2019t want,\u201d despite the fact that everyone, everywhere, will require health care, the Feds can simply enact a massive single-payer system with your tax dollars that will remove your choices, raise overall costs, and create a bureaucracy and federal ownership that would dwarf the current obligations created by the most recent legislation. <\/p>\n
That would be a crappy-yet-constitutional solution. <\/p>\n
The Tea Party is looking for an intellectual silver bullet; an easy way out, a shortcut to bypass hard choices. So they dangle the Constitution in everyone\u2019s face and presume that it has all the answers, when, in fact, it doesn\u2019t. It doesn\u2019t claim to have them, and it\u2019s folly to pretend otherwise. What\u2019s more, worship of that inspired document doesn\u2019t provide the political will to enact policy, especially when the policy is controversial.<\/p>\n
Consider, for instance, the push for a Balanced Budget Amendment. Senator-elect Lee has been insistent that the way to fiscal discipline is to mandate such discipline constitutionally. <\/p>\n
Neat. Except a Balanced Budget Amendment doesn\u2019t actually balance the budget. You still have to make the hard choices to do that. <\/p>\n
Right now, doing that overnight would require gruesome cuts that would likely double the unemployment rate overnight, gut Social Security and Medicare, and cripple defense spending. It could also result in massive, judicially mandated tax increases. Won\u2019t that be delightful to have the Supreme Court diddling with the Tax Code in order to satisfy the constitutional requirement for a balanced budget? Whether you\u2019re a fan of Clarence Thomas or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, do you really want either one of them tinkering with tax policy? <\/p>\n
The more likely outcome, however, is that you would create a Congress of scofflaws, just like California has done on a statewide level with their own superfluous state balanced budget amendment. <\/p>\n
Notice that California has a rigorous balanced budget amendment – but no balanced budget. Every time they pass a budget, they simply ignore the law. <\/p>\n
Tea Party Mormons, notably Glenn Beck, are particularly egregious in terms of their Constitution worship, because they cite a dubious Mormon prophecy to justify their contention that the Constitution is \u201changing by a thread,\u201d which is simply untrue. All the fundamental provisions of the Constitution remain firmly in place. What they\u2019re trying to do is cloak their own policy preferences in highminded Constitutional language, but their interpretation of the Constitution is no less singular \u2013 or valid – than Barack Obama\u2019s. <\/p>\n
To quote Antonin Scalia, \u201cYou can be stupid and Constitutional at the same time.\u201d <\/p>\n
It\u2019s time we stop pretending that there are any easy answers. We\u2019re not going to solve our nation\u2019s problems by wearing tri-cornered hats and quoting Patrick Henry with loud, angry voices. (Incidentally, Patrick Henry refused to attend the Constitutional Convention and was adamantly opposed thereto.) We have to use the inspired, brilliant 18th Century constitutional procedures, which remain firmly in place, to find 21st Century solutions. <\/p>\n
Either that, or we need to scrap the Air Force. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TheAir Force is clearly unconstitutional. Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution gives the United States the power to \u201cTo provide and maintain a Navy\u201d and to \u201cTo raise and support Armies.\u201d The Marine Corps and the Coast Guard might be able to be justified as extensions of the Navy, but there\u2019s nothing ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}