RIGHT OF CENTER: MUCH OF BUDGET IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Watching the budget debate now raging in our nation's capital, we hear much rhetoric about the merits of cutting the power and scope of the federal government. But I'm struck less by what is said by Republicans and Democrats to justify or condemn such cuts than I am appalled at what isn't mentioned.

I have yet to hear a passioned and reasoned argument from either side for cutting the federal government on the grounds that 90 percent of what Congress packs into the $1,600,000,000,000 budget isn't authorized by the Constitution.

But if you ask a liberal to name one activity or program that Congress might delve into that isn't sanctioned by the Constitution, chances are he'll be unable to come up with one. A conservative Republican likely could compile a half a dozen things the Constitution doesn't authorize. Regardless of which side you ask, I'm certain the list would be woefully inadequate.

In the budget debate, for example, the majority GOP has suggested that anywhere from two to five federal departments be eliminated. Left untouched are programs that take money from the general public and hand it over to farmers, the poor and unemployed, health-care providers, businesses, foreign governments, and cities and states to finance everything from midnight basketball leagues to swimming pools and tennis courts.

The most recent issue of "Policy Review," published by the Heritage Foundation, contains an article titled "The Unconstitutional Congress." The author, Stephen Moore, writes: "The Founders did not create a Department of Commerce, a Department of Education, or a Department of Housing and Urban Development. This was no oversight: they simply never imagined that government would take an active role in such activities."

Today, we can't imagine a government that isn't involved in such minutiae of public and private life. Aside from the problems spawned by a burgeoning national debt and an ever-expanding centralized, inefficient and burdensome federal government, we should be alarmed at how far government's reach has extended beyond the Founders' legal framework of the Constitution.

We can give away as much of our own money as we please in charity, but members of Congress have no right to appropriate $1 of public money. There you go again, Eastlick, with your radical, regressive, far-right views. But those aren't my words. They were spoken, and cited in the "Policy Review" article, in the early 19th century by Congressman Davy Crockett, during whose first term of office a $10,000 relief bill was introduced to help out the widow of a naval officer. Crockett rose and said, "We must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not attempt to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it."

Public charity is contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the United States was founded. More Eastlick ranting? No, only the words of President Franklin Pierce after he vetoed a popular bill in 1854 intended to help the mentally ill.

Is there any question that about the vast majority of spending in the federal budget today, congressmen and senators could say, as President Grover Cleveland did in the late 1800s, "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution?"

Of course Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal used the Constitution's general-welfare clause to justify all manner of legal plunder. But it's clear the clause was meant to limit, not expand, government. Why else would Thomas Jefferson clarify its meaning in 1798 by writing: "Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."

But once the floodgates of government restraint were opened there was no stopping the flood of pork-barrel spending and behemoth bureaucracies that pour forth from Congress. As Moore writes, to argue now that we return to the spirit and the true meaning of the Constitution "is to invite a look of scorn, malice, or outright disbelief from modern-day intellectuals."

And so we hear nothing of Founders' original intent in the modern debate over down-sizing government. But if we aren't willing to defend the Constitution's original intent -- if it truly is a "living document" -- then the only philosophically honest position for politicians to take would be to demand its abandonment, such is the extent of decay it has suffered. I happen to value with more regard the Constitution than the modern state. So did those hundreds of thousands who died in wars fought for the precepts inscribed by our nation's Founding Fathers.

~Jay Eastlick is the news editor of the Southeast Missourian.