Michael Tanner: Democrats: The Constitution Is ‘Weird’
[Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.]
When Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell told Delaware voters that the Constitution, rather than her personal views, would guide her votes in the Senate, one might have expected a variety of responses from the Left — perhaps a huge sigh of relief that we’ve all been saved from a federal law banning masturbation.
But the response was actually far stranger, and tells us far more about the state of contemporary liberalism. Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick summed up the reaction, writing that she found it “weird” that O’Donnell would consider the constitutionality of legislation. If we have to consider constitutionality at all, Lithwick mused, that certainly isn’t the job of Congress. They should just pass whatever they want and let the courts worry about it later....
This has been the Left’s view of government power at least since the Roosevelt administration. It was Franklin Roosevelt, after all, who wrote to a congressional committee chair, “I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.”
But what has unrestrained federal power really done for us? How many of our problems has it fixed? The federal government has spent more than $13 trillion fighting poverty since Lyndon Johnson declared his “war on poverty” in 1965....
Read entire article at National Review
When Republican candidate Christine O’Donnell told Delaware voters that the Constitution, rather than her personal views, would guide her votes in the Senate, one might have expected a variety of responses from the Left — perhaps a huge sigh of relief that we’ve all been saved from a federal law banning masturbation.
But the response was actually far stranger, and tells us far more about the state of contemporary liberalism. Slate columnist Dahlia Lithwick summed up the reaction, writing that she found it “weird” that O’Donnell would consider the constitutionality of legislation. If we have to consider constitutionality at all, Lithwick mused, that certainly isn’t the job of Congress. They should just pass whatever they want and let the courts worry about it later....
This has been the Left’s view of government power at least since the Roosevelt administration. It was Franklin Roosevelt, after all, who wrote to a congressional committee chair, “I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.”
But what has unrestrained federal power really done for us? How many of our problems has it fixed? The federal government has spent more than $13 trillion fighting poverty since Lyndon Johnson declared his “war on poverty” in 1965....