By Mr. Curmudgeon
During the health care debate, a reporter asked Nancy Pelosi, “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” The stunned Pelosi shook her head and answered with a question of her own, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
Later that same day, Nadeam Elshami, a press spokesman for Pelosi told the same reporter, “You can put this on the record: that is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”
Eventually, the Speaker’s office did release a statement. “…The Constitution gives Congress broad power to regulate activities that have an effect on interstate commerce. Congress has used this authority to regulate many aspects of American life…Since virtually every aspect of the health care system has an effect on interstate commerce, the power of Congress to regulate health care is essentially unlimited.”
Did you get that? By Pelosi’s definition, her power is “unlimited.” The Constitution’s Commerce Clause, granting lawmaker’s power to regulate the commercial activities between the states, in Pelosi’s view, gives big government power to regulate the lives of all individuals who buy the products and services Pelosi regulates. Unless you are willing to live like Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) in a mountain shack of your own making, we’re all pretty much Pelosi’s slaves.
And no one is more in love with that idea than the New York Times. In an editorial titled “The Republicans and the Constitution,” the Old Gray Lady said, “At her [Supreme Court] confirmation hearings, Ms. [Elena] Kagan refused to take Republican bait and agree to suggest limits on the clause’s meaning. This infuriated the conservatives on the Senate Judiciary Committee because it has been that clause, more than any other, that has been at the heart of the expansion of government power since the New Deal.”
Limits on Pelosi’s “unlimited” power? Are you serious? Are you serious?
The Times then gets to the real problem the left has with the Tea Party…and, amazingly, it has nothing to do with race. “Because it can be so broadly interpreted, the [Commerce] clause has been a target for legal conservatives for decades, all the way up to the current Tea Party diatribes against it. Some conservatives have even proposed that the Tea Party push a constitutional amendment to limit its interpretation.”
And there you have it.
As much as the Tea Party threatens the Democrat’s ruling majority this November, their minds (and that of big-government Beltway Republicans) rest easy in the knowledge that the Commerce Clause will remain safely stored in the big-government tool shed to prune away our liberties another day.
But the Times has provided a public service in broaching the subject of amending the Constitution as a means to rain-in Pelosi’s “unlimited” power. “But,” you say, “don’t Constitutional Amendments first originate with Congress to then be decided by two-thirds of the state legislatures?” For all of our nation’s history this has been the case, but that is a mere accident of history.
According to Article V of the U.S. Constitution, “…Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution.”
“Taking the country back” is an often-heard cry at boisterous Tea Party rallies. The sad fact is that until the Commerce Clause is amended to limit Pelosi’s “unlimited” power, taking back the House, Senate and, eventually, the White House is a Pyrrhic victory.
The Tea Party’s strength is at the state level. After the midterm elections, the various state Tea Party’s need to push hard to pressure two-thirds of the nation’s state legislatures to call for a Constitutional Convention to limit Pelosi’s “unlimited” power before we are all rendered federal serfs.
Of course, there are those who fear what amendments might result from such a convention. My answer is simple: “Who do you trust to amend the Constitution? The nation’s sovereign “We the People,” or Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan?” And who do you think Nancy Pelosi trusts?
“A vote against the commerce clause,” said the New York Times editorial “is a vote against some of the best things that government has done for the better part of a century, and some of the best things that lie ahead.”
What the editorial writers at the Times saw as an uplifting closing line to their editorial is actually a frightening warning. For who knows what horrible things “lie ahead” for Americans at the tender mercy of government’s “unlimited” power.
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