Saying No to Federal Dictation. The states of Connecticut and Utah — one Blue State, one Red — have both challenged the "No Child Left Behind" attempt to impose Federal standards on education, a state responsibility. "No Child Left Behind" is an appalling overreach into areas forbidden to the Federal Government. It is, as well, riddled with the notorious "unfunded mandates" that states and localities have tolerated for far too long. The Feds pass a law requiring states to do things, but then don't provide any money for them to do those things with! That's an outrage. It is even more outrageous when the Feds dare to invade an area of exclusive state jurisdiction — like education, which the Constitution does not authorize the Federal Government to act in at all, and thus, as the Constitution works, forbids the Federal Government to act in. The Tenth and final Amendment of the Bill of Rights says plainly:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

That's very clear, isn't it? What the Federal Government is not authorized by the Constitution to do, it is forbidden to do. All powers not given to the Feds "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". That means directly or indirectly: what the Federal Government is forbidden to do directly, it may not do indirectly, as by compelling states to do things against their will. Otherwise, a prohibition on action would be easily sidestepped. For instance, we don't just forbid people to commit murder themselves. We also forbid them to hire someone to commit murder for them. We forbid both direct and indirect murder, and the Constitution forbids the Federal Government from asserting proscribed powers directly and indirectly.
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But the (temporary) officeholders now in charge of the Federal Government don't want any limit on the power they wield, so they ignore the express wording of the Constitution, all the while pretending to be "conservatives" and "strict constructionists" who bitch and moan about "activist judges" doing things the Constitution does not authorize. What about "activist Presidents" and "activist Congresses" that issue executive orders the Constitution forbids and pass "laws" that Congress is forbidden to write?
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The powers of Congress (and thus of the President, who enforces the laws properly passed by Congress) are enumerated in the Constitution, at Article I — ONE! You don't have to read too far to find the list; it's in Article I! — Section 8. (Hmm. Section 8: "'Section 8' is common U.S. slang for 'crazy', based on the U.S. military's Section 8 discharge for mentally unfit personnel." I'd say that allowing the Federal Government to ignore the Constitution's express enumeration of its powers and the reservation of all powers not enumerated to the states or the people instead is crazy. How appropriate.)
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Despite the Tenth Amendment and Article I, Section 8, Congress and the President keep passing "laws" they are forbidden to pass. They are not really laws, but merely acts of pretended legislation that are dictatorial abuse of the American people, who are supposed to be protected from abuse by our federal structure and the express provisions of the Constitution. But the Constitution is only words, and words are no match for a powerful, nearly all-powerful, Federal Government of 12.1 million people directly and indirectly involved in carrying out Federal mandates! That includes over 2 million direct Federal civilian employees and 1.4 million uniformed military personnel. I had no idea that the Federal Government was that big. Did you? The Congressional Budget Office("CBO") in 2001 confirmed this scale of overall employment. In fact, the following webpage shows it to be 13 million: http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=2864&sequence=0#part1. It gets worse. Both the CBO and the National Center for Policy Analysis ("NCPA") cite studies by Paul Light of the Brookings Institution as the source for their overall count. The NCPA says:

In addition to individuals who owe their employment directly to the federal government, the report suggests states still need to add about three million jobs by 2010 to meet Bush administration mandates in education and homeland security, although no such growth appears yet in the study. That would bring total federal-related employment to 20 million from 17 million, Light predicts.

So when the Feds say "Jump!", the states have tended, all too often, to ask "How high?" Maybe that is finally changing.
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The excuse that powergrabbing Feds have used for their ever-increasing stranglehold on society is that the "elastic clause", the last paragraph of Section 8, authorizes them to do anything they damned well please. But read the exact text of the "elastic clause".

[Finally, Congress is authorized] To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

That is a far cry from authorization to ride roughshod over the states and the people. It grants Congress only authority to make laws in pursuance of "the foregoing powers" and any other power given to any other part of the Government, e.g., the President's power to make treaties. It does not say that powers not granted can simply be grabbed.
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The word "education" does not appear in the Constitution, for good reason: the Founders never intended that the Federal Government take over from states and localities responsibility for and power over education.
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The Federal Government was intended to do, basically, only those things that individual states could not do because more than one state was involved. The "United States" was, originally, much like the United Nations is today: a body to facilitate interactions among sovereign states, not a supergovernment entitled to dictate to the states and take away all their powers.
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The original Thirteen States were very jealous of their perquisites and were willing to allow the Federal Government to control only interstate matters, not matters that states could control within their own borders. That worked very well for a very long time. We should go back to that, and challenges to "No Child Left Behind" are a good place to start, to restore federalism to a country that is moving precipitously toward a unitary state — with all the dangers to liberty intrinsic in a massive government being authorized to do anything it wants to anyone, anytime, no matter what the Constitution may say.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,868.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:17 PM