Relevance of the Constitution in local and state elections
With election signs everywhere, it is unrealistic to expect national candidates to follow the Constitution when we did not insist that they did so in local and state elections. After all, many simply move up to higher office. Some may even view the Constitution as irrelevant at these levels.
Several years ago, at a public debate for county supervisor in California, the public was invited to offer written questions. I did so and watched the debate monitor, with a puzzled look on his face, sideline my question in preference to others. I presumed it was because it raised a constitutional concern, which unfortunately is considered by many to be an irrelevant topic at the city, county, or even state levels. One is supposed to ask about what “goodies” from taxpayer funding you are going to give me and if it is more than your opponent.
So what does the Constitution have to do with local or state issues? Everything!
First, it is the only document that every elected public servant swears by oath to uphold. So the founders must have thought it relevant at lower levels.
Second, candidates at lower levels successfully rise to higher levels because of the name recognition obtained at lower levels and eventually become members of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, often without ever having read the Constitution they are specifically under oath to protect. When I worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. Senate years ago, I was certain that at least 50 percent had never read it at any level of government. Today, I would be surprised if those who had read it exceeded 10 percent. No one asks candidates while campaigning when they last read it.
So again, why does this matter? Historically, the two major enemies of freedom are that it is the nature of all governments to pull decision making power upward to the seat of government and that the more apathetic and indifferent the population becomes, the greater the tendency of the people to push decision-making power upwards to the seat of government. When these two forces work together, it always leads to the central government eventually having most of the power. The Constitution is full of “handcuffs” to keep decision-making power from getting to the top, thus maximizing it with the individual. The founders’ overriding philosophy of government, if it could be penned into one sentence, was, “never elevate to a higher level that which can be resolved at a lesser level.”
Even a casual look at the Constitution reveals the separation of powers on the federal level into three distinct branches: the legislative, executive, and judicial — each with a specific list of powers.
For Congress, it was a list of the four types of law they could make (Art. I, Sec. 8). For the president, it was the types of executive functions he or she could execute (Art. II, Sec. 2-3), and for the Supreme Court it was the types of cases it could adjudicate (Art. III, Sec. 2).
The lists exist both to restrict them and to prohibit the concentration of power into one branch. The only type of federal government authorized by the founders was decidedly a limited one. States, counties, and cities have all the powers not listed, as per the 10th Amendment.
When these limitations are not understood and protected at lower levels of government, the federal government is constantly tempted to steal authority from the states or counties as per its confiscating, environmental, health, and education issues, which are constitutionally 100 percent non-federal government issues.
States, counties, and cities should use the 10th Amendment to tell the federal government to butt out as it has no constitutional authority. When Congress passed and the president signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act Dec. 31, 2012, both states and counties should have written Congress and the president to say, “You may not void Amendments 4, 5, 6, and 8 of The Bill of Rights and the writ of habeas corpus for our citizens.”
Sixty years ago, it may not have made much difference if a county supervisor or commissioner or a city councilman swore allegiance to a Constitution that he had not fully studied — or worse, that he had not even read. The federal government had not yet absorbed his area of jurisdiction.
Now it has! There is hardly an area where the federal government does not have its tentacles embedded, from school lunches to cross-gender bathrooms. Over 30 years ago, a city councilman complained to me that a third of what he voted on was already mandated because sometime in the past the council had accepted the “free money” that now obligated him. School districts are notorious for having done the same thing.
City, county, and state leaders, you are the buffer that can prevent the federal government from taking from you your areas of jurisdiction. They have done so for many years because you were complacent or ignorant of the Constitution. Consequently, you have lost a large portion of our liberty. Today, your understanding of the document must be known before we place you in power.
This election let us find leaders with constitutional fire in their bellies to undo the precedents that their predecessors created. All issues on the city and county levels are directly or indirectly constitutional issues. We now expect leaders to know and abide by the document that they swear to uphold.
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