Do We Have a Constitution or Not?

Do We Have a Constitution or Not?

The entire purpose of our Constitution is to restrain the federal government. Today, both Democrat and Republican leaders regularly pretend we don't have a Constitution in areas where they prefer not to be restrained. First the Democrats, or as The American Spectator's James Antle explains concerning today's ObamaCare court decision:

"Do we even have a written Constitution? That is really the fundamental question at stake in the Obamacare case. Many countries are governed by unwritten constitutions, a patchwork of court decisions, legal and political precedents, laws, and customs that shape the boundaries of government rather than any single document. Over the past eighty years, the United States has increasingly moved to that system as well. But even the post-New Deal, post-World War II consensus has always tried to appeal to our written Constitution for authority, which its champions have pretended to revere as a living document.

This case is the biggest conflicit between the unwritten constitution that gives the federal government virtually unlimited power to, as Laurence Silberman puts it, 'forge national solutions to national problems' and the actual Constitution on which Washington bases its legitimacy, a document that created a limited federal government of enumerated powers. Those powers, by the way, are delegated by the states and the people."

Antle asks: "Who delegated the power to impose an individual mandate?"

And now for Republicans' disregard for the Constitution, or as Conservative HQ's Richard Viguerie writes of Saturday night's foreign policy debate:

"Saturday's CBS/National Journal Republican presidential debate on foreign policy once again showed the limits of the establishment media's grasp of constitutional principles and how the Constitution, as the law that governs government, should instruct our foreign policy. During the entire event, the questions seemed to assume that the President is unconstrained in his or her ability to act in matters of national security ­ and that the role of Commander-in-Chief is tantamount to being a military dictator. Unfortunately, with the exception of Congressman Ron Paul, the Republican candidates for President generally joined this shallow analysis and skipped-over the Constitution in their answers…

Those who object to re-establishing the Constitutional role of Congress in matters of national security because it makes national security too public and too complicated might ponder what Congressman Ron Paul said during Saturday's debate, '…you go to the Congress and find out if our national security is threatened… [then] you get a declaration of war and you fight it and you win it and get it over with.'

Viguerie concluded: "That sounds a whole lot less complicated, and a whole lot more in line with what the Founders had in mind for how to conduct our foreign relations, than what is going on in national security policy right now."

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/2011/11/14/do-we-have-a-constitution-or-not/