Readings For Next Week

Some of you have asked me how far we will get in the next few classes.

I think we will try to get through Assignment 14 Wednesday and Assignment 15 on Thursday.

That may be as far as we get for the week; let's see where we are after next Thursday's class and go from there.

Weekend Thought: Is it too late to Restore Federalism?

Sometimes I get discouraged. It just seems that the 10th Amendment and the reserved powers of the states and we the people in the states are lost forever, and we have lost the Constitutional government that we were bequeathed by the Founders. But then I think of Katniss Everdeen of the Hunger Games.

As that well-known federalist and lover-of-liberty once observed, even after the Capitol usurps the reserved powers of the Districts and the liberty of we the people in the Districts, it is never too late to reclaim those powers and liberties. Here is how Katniss put it:

"President Snow once admitted to me that the Capitol was fragile. At the time, I didn't know what he meant. It was hard to see clearly because I was so afraid. Now I'm not. The Capitol's fragile because it depends on the districts for everything. Food, energy, even the Peacekeepers that police us. If we declare our freedom, the Capitol collapses. President Snow, thanks to you, I'm officially declaring mine today."

[Mockingjay at 169.]

Well put, Miss Everdeen! 

Maybe the odds are in your favor after all.

Roberts and Obamacare

I. Madison and Federalist No. 45

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

II.  Spending Clause, Commerce Clause and Tenth Amendment

Art. I Section 8.

         The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States;

The Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

III.   Bork on Temptation of the Judiciary:


The late, great Robert Bork once brilliantly explained how a judge can be tempted to follow his own views of justice rather than to do his duty and follow the law:

In law, the moment of temptation is the moment of choice, when a judge realizes that in the case before him his strogly held views of justice, his political and moral imperative, is not embodied in a statute or in any provision of the Constitution. He must then choose between his version of justice and abiding by the American form of government. Yet the desire to do justice, whose nature seems to him obvious, is compelling, while the concept of constitutional process is abstract, rather arid, and the abstinence it counsels unsatisfying. To give in to temptation, this one time, solves an urgent human problem, and a faint crack appears in the American foundation. A judge has begun to rule where a legislator should.