In the comment-thread of a recent post, I’ve been arguing with our resident gadfly The One Eyed Man about the Constitutional legitimacy of Obamacare’s individual mandate — part of a broader disagreement about the proper scope of Federal power.
After much back-and-forth I wrote:
Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, philosophy, logic, and even psychology. You and I can discuss it at any length we like, and it’s stimulating and interesting to do so, but ultimately what we decide here doesn’t really matter. We have our opinions, but the only opinion that carries any weight is the Court’s, and even that one looks to be fairly closely divided on this issue.
Supreme Court appointments matter. It’s one of the big reasons why the the next Presidential election matters so much.
I almost added the following, but thought I’d post it here instead:
Most of the bickering about these Constitutional-limitation issues is a matter not of Constitutional “truth”, but of temperament, and of axiomatic differences about the proper form and scope of government. To paraphrase G.C. Lichtenberg, the Constitution is like a mirror: if a Utopian looks in, you can’t expect a realist to look out.
The United States Federal Government is the largest and most complex apparatus of state power that has ever existed. It rules over hundreds of millions of people and the largest economy in history, and it wields military strength that dwarfs any other that the world has ever seen.
“That may be true,” you say, “but why bring it up?”
I bring it up because we individual citizens are small, and the bigger the Federal government is, the smaller we each become in relation to it. Actions of the Federal government must be broad enough in scope to apply with the same fairness and aptness to the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Texas, and Hawaii as they do to me. I am one voice in hundreds of millions, and my local concerns will compete with those of all those other, far-flung corners of the Union — places whose social, political, religious and economic contexts and concerns may differ from my own community’s in a thousand ways.
On the other hand, my state’s government is far smaller, and my county and municipal governments smaller still. Being so much smaller means that they can focus with much sharper resolution on the particular issues that confront their little subset of the nation’s geography and population — and that those citizens will far better able to make their voices heard above the din.
People will generally be happier, will have more control over the affairs of government that daily affect their lives, and will better able to create a shared public life as a community, the more that the mass of government power lies as closely to their local community as possible. After all, the central principle of our Republic is that power flows from the people upward, not from the Federal government downward. The apex of collective power in Washington should be the small end of the pyramid, not its base.
Moreover, in a Republic of semi-autonomous States, each becomes its own laboratory of innovation. Given that there are many ways to solve the myriad problems of governance, decentralization of power makes possible the exploration and comparison of different solutions, with every State free to adopt those that seem best suited to their local temperament, and to serve as an example to others.
If you want further justification for this view, then consider that men are fallible, and prone to the abuse of power. Wisdom then suggests that the less centralized and concentrated the power, the narrower will be the possible scope of its abuse — and the closer those entrusted with such power are to those to whom they are answerable, the warier they will be of the consequences.
These, then, are some of the reasons why we conservatives prefer the bridle to the spur when it comes to aggrandizations and consolidations of Federal power. I won’t attempt to articulate the opposing view, but comments are welcome, as always.
