We currently have a commission investigating how to deal with our ballooning deficit and Brobdingnagian debt. In the past we have had a commission on military base closings and I am sure there were others that don’t immediately come to mind. Why do we need them when Congress and the President have the necessary power to make these changes? Cowardice. It may be a harsh charge, but that is basically it, no one wants to go on record making tough choices, but if they can get an unelected bipartisan commission to make a recommendation that Congress can vote “all or none” then there are plenty of political fig leaves to go around.
“Well, I didn’t vote for that one, I voted for this one, but it was an all or nothing deal so I couldn’t separate them out.” We pay these people $174,000 each in base pay and they punt the hard choices to a commission. Why? Because they see their primary job as keeping that $174,000 per year job, something that gets easier once you are an incumbent, so long as you don’t make a major mistake, like a hard decision for the benefit of the country.
If you look at the Constitution, the powers granted to the federal government were few and defined, as Madison put it in Federalist No. 45. With such limited and defined powers, the federal government should focus on a limited number of items and deal with them directly. But the size and scope of the federal government has grown enormously and the current administration wants to grow it even more enormously. So don’t look for any tough choices. Look for more and more commissions to deliver up “solutions” that the weak kneed members of Congress can vote up or down for. This is gridlock by design.
Once you move most government functions to the federal level, how can anything possibly be accomplished? How do you pass a law that benefits New York and doesn’t harm Alaska? How much do Alaska and New York have in common? Perhaps that is why most major pieces of legislation coming out of Congress run into thousands of pages? Look at it this way, if a bill of twenty pages is applied differently to fifty states, you soon have 1,000 pages. But what the Constitution says is that there are a few enumerated powers given to the federal government and everything else is left to the states and the people. Let the people of Mississippi pass a law of twenty pages that suits the people of Mississippi and let the people of Idaho pass their own. This will bring about the ability for the other 48 states to look at these two examples and decide for themselves which one would work better in their state or choose a completely different path or none at all. But if it is all at the federal level you can yell and scream and jump up and down on your Congressman’s desk for all that matters and he can say, “Gosh, I’m just one of 435 members here. I agree with what you are saying, but…” If the issue is at the state level you have more clout and at the local level even more so.
But what we have is a government whose spending is out of control. We have a commission that will not report until after the mid-term elections and as sure as I draw a breath, their report will be full of new taxes including a Value Added Tax (VAT) to bring buckets of tax revenue to put out the spending conflagration. Sure there will be some spending cuts, mostly in the discretionary areas that don’t add up to much of the budget anyway, but probably make for good media coverage.
We need to shrink the monster. We need to take away from the federal government those responsibilities that are not spelled out in the Constitution and let the states and their residents decide how to handle the rest, if at all. If we don’t take these steps, the gridlock we see today will continue. The only difference will be that our Congressional representatives will be making over $200,000 a year before long to do what would get them fired in the private sector.
