Horse Sense: Mechanics of Consolidation (Part I)

Consolidation of power at the national level has occurred, and that is historic fact. Just why it is, is something more difficult to tell. I remember in graduate school at Oxford expressing a certain naïve measure of wonderment, that what the Founders intended did not come to pass and indeed went badly wrong in some respects. One of my professors with a Harvard background merely smiled, without explanation but with apparent glee. He was a proponent of consolidation you see, and he knew that proponents of liberty were on the losing side of history thus far. There are evil professors making muck of minds and placing their stamp, yea mark, upon the careers of young academics, and writing the textbooks and determining acceptable “consensus” amongst those who depend upon them for their Ph. D’s. I tell you this, having been there in the Ivy League; I tell you this to sound a trumpet—there’s more than one global war going on! Some are wars between nations, twixt civilizations, but the biggest war of all is always spiritual—and its close cousin, the war of ideas. Simple really, this war of ideas: it is between those who would control, and those who would set free.
I know now more than I did, some of the history that isn’t always taught. One place to begin is in the Senate. That august body was meant to be an institutional safeguard against consolidation. Indeed, the Founders expected it to serve as guardian of States’ reserved powers. The reason may come as some surprise to you. It is because the Founders intended Senators to be selected by State legislatures. Senators would therefore be direct representatives of the States, within the Legislative branch of the national government. That was indeed law according to the Constitution, before adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. Like the federal income tax, passed by the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 also, popular election of U.S. Senators is the product of the Progressive Era, which transformed the nation even more than the War Between the States did, at least if taken in isolation. The Progressive Era, so far as the Constitution is concerned, represents a departure from republicanism and institutionalized safeguarding of dual-sovereignty; it represents a corresponding triumph for national party politics and blind faith in democracy. One has to wonder why the Founders would have worked so hard at the Constitutional Convention, if all that were needed were elections and the people’s choice.
Next there is the very strange gravitation of all issues and concerns to the national level, something that continues to this day as if towards a black hole. What were clearly intra-state activities, to be regulated by local officials, have all fallen in Congress’s purview of delegated powers. Congress has express power to punish only a handful of acts, such as piracy, crimes on the high seas, treason, and counterfeiting according to the Constitution. The number of crimes punishable by the federal government did increase after Appomattox, but it did not skyrocket until recent years. Over forty percent of federal crimes were enacted since 1970. The reason, which may not come as quite the surprise, is political. Senators and congressmen found that law-and-order platforms are winners at the ballot box. Tough-on-crime conservative politicians found liberal colleagues to be cuddly bed partners too. The fact remains, however, the people of the several States never delegated a generalized “law and order” power to the federal government. Of course congressmen are want to find it, like a catcher in the rye. So broad in fact is Congress’s interpretation of the Commerce Power, that other enumerated powers are superfluous. The regulation of interstate commerce has become akin to a general police power, such that, if anything could affect the national economy, Congress can regulate. Of course that’s a crazy, unconstitutional assertion, because my friends will all tell you my backyard barbeque no doubt threatens a series of establishments! (Be that as it may,) commerce in the Founders’ day was understood to be, well, uh “commerce.” That is, commercial intercourse, i.e., exchange of one thing for another, the interchange of something, trade or the trafficking of goods. Commerce was not, as Congress and the Supreme Court now interprets, a synonym for every “gainful activity,” “economic activity,” “agriculture” and “manufacturing” activity. James Madison noted that the object of the power to regulate interstate commerce was “the relief of the States which import and export through other States.” In other words, the Founders wanted to remove internal trade barriers and create a national free-trade zone. Ironically, the freedom they sought to give us has, through the politician’s turn of phrase and sinister Constitutional reinterpretation, become the source of much internal regulation, constituting an unlimited grant of legislative power. Today any activity that tangentially affects the economy, or could affect the economy if hypothetically, a lot of people engaged in it, is fair game for regulation—and quite possibly, another platform for winning votes. (Yippee).
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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford. Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary. Article loosely based on William J. Watkins, Jr., Reclaiming the American Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), chapters 4-6. Email: wes@wesriddle.com.