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Constitution Day Message
Heritage Foundation…
Morning
Bell: Our Constitution Is
Under Fire
Matthew Spalding, Ph.D.
September
17, 2012
Today,
the federal government has
acquired an all but unquestioned dominance over virtually every area of
American life. It acts without constitutional limits and increasingly
regulates
our most basic activities, from how much water is in our toilets to
what kind
of light bulbs we can buy.
So
while we face many challenges,
the most difficult task ahead—and the most important—is to restore
constitutional limits on government. Forty visionaries signed a piece
of paper
225 years ago today that became one of the most vital documents in the
world:
the U.S. Constitution.
By
design, it limited the power of
government under the rule of law, created a vigorous framework that
expanded
economic opportunity, protected national independence and secured
liberty and
justice for all. But how is that limitation of powers working today?
The
Judicial Branch. The rise of
unlimited government is most familiar and most prominent in the form of
judicial activism. The Founders called the judiciary the “least
dangerous
branch,” but progressive judges have usurped the functions of the other
two
branches and transformed the courts into policymaking bodies with
wide-ranging
power. We need judges who take the Constitution seriously and follow it
faithfully.
The
Legislative Branch. For its
part, Congress has long legislated without regard to limits on its
powers. As a
result, decisions that were previously the constitutional
responsibility of
elected legislators are delegated to executive branch administrators.
Congress
is increasingly an administrative body overseeing a vast array of
bureaucratic
policymakers and rule-making bodies. Congress should stop delegating to
bureaucrats and actively take responsibility for all the laws (and
regulations)
that govern us.
The
Executive Branch. Meanwhile,
the President has unique and powerful responsibilities in our
constitutional
system as chief executive officer, head of state, and commander in
chief. But
the idea that the president— who is charged with the execution of the
laws—doesn’t have to wait for the lawmaking branch to make, amend, or
abolish
laws, but can and should act on his own is toxic to the rule of law. It
violates the spirit, and potentially the letter, of the Constitution’s
separation of the legislative and executive powers of Congress and the
President.
It
won’t be easy to return to the
founding principles. We’ll have to move one step at a time, and walk
back
decades worth of bad decisions by members of all three branches of
government.
But it can be done, if we use the written Constitution as our guide and
we
believe that it means what it says and says what it means…
Read
the rest of the article at
Heritage Foundation
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