Times Clearly Call for a Return to Constitutional Government.

By Charley Reese

By the time you read this, the federal government will have shut down and--much to my dismay--reopened.

I would like to see it shut down permanently in its current form and returned to a constitutional government, which, I grant, most Americans would not recongize, having never lived under one..

A constitutional government would not be invovled at all with public education, public welfare, environmental matters or most of the other areas into which the current federal government sticks its hoglike snout

The Constituion really did intend--as is plain, if you read it, which nobody does these days--a limited federal government with virtually all the domestic governing to be done by the states. The Constitution was written and ratified by the states, not by the people, and it was intended to be an agent of the states.

That's the meaning of the Tenth Amedment in the Bill of Rights: "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."

It didn't take long, however, after ratification of sovereign states. That dispute clouded by the issue of slavery, was the real cause of the War Between the States--American history as rewritten by Hollywood and television scripwriters notwithstanding.

Thus, nationalists said the issue was settled once and for all on the batlefield. But they were wrong. The South may not rise again, but the issue of state sovereignty is rising again. You can see it in complaints about federal mandates, in complaints about states being forced to provide servies to illegal immigrants, and in arguments that states can handle welfare and public education better than the federal government.

In my opinion, House Speaker Newt gingrich is trying to stifle this movement to restore the proper balance between states and the federal government by offering Trojan-horse solutions--block grants to states. But making block grants of federal money is sill maintaining federal control.

The old system of a limited federal role is by far the more practial system. People who love federal money forget that it was originally the people's money. The federal tax collector not only weakens the individual by taking money from him, but it also weakens state and local governements by sucking up wealth that could otherwise be taxed at the local level and spent more sensibly.

The liberal belief that federal is somehow holier than state, that people in the federal government are somehow better than people in the state systems, is, of course, not only false but stupid as well. Nearly all the people in the federal government came from the state governemtns. Nothing magic happens when a state legislator gets elected a federal legislator. There is no visitation by God and annointing of holy wisdom when a state judge gets a political patronage appointment to the federal bench. We are one people, the same humans, for better or worse, no matter what level of government we serve.

The advantage of state and local governments is not that they magically govern better, but that the people can keep up with shenanigans at that level much easier and so correct the abuses at the ballot box. It's a lot easier to find out what your local councilman or state legislator is doing than it is find out what your federal senator is up to. The other advantage is not that it is obviously easier for officals to make decisions about areas in which they have personal knowledge. What does a man from South Florida, sent to Washington know about the problems of Souther California and Alaska? Nothing.

Now that slavery and segregation are dead, maybe we can debate the real issue--the Constituion.