Politics, Constitutional Decline and Government Overreach

By Roger Pilon

This article appeared in the Fall 2013 Issue of the Jewish Policy Center’s inFocus Quarterly.

“What’s the Constitution among friends?” asked Ohio’s John F. Follett in the House in 1884. Still in the offing, constitutional decline was only stirring. In fact, three years later, 100 years after the Constitution was written, President Grover Cleveland would veto a bill appropriating the paltry sum of $10,000 for seeds for Texas farmers suffering from a drought. “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution,” his veto message said.

Cleveland was simply echoing a long settled understanding that ours is a Constitution that authorizes only limited government. Not that calls for more government had not been heard from the start. In 1791, for example, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton unveiled his Report on Manufactures—an early industrial policy scheme. Congress promptly shelved it. And in 1794, the Constitution’s principal author, James Madison, finding before him a bill for the relief of French refugees fleeing to Baltimore and Philadelphia from an insurrection in San Domingo, rose on the floor of the House to declare, unremarkably, that he could not “undertake to lay his finger on that article of the Federal Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending on objects of benevolence the money of their constituents.”

“How did a nation conceived in and dedicated to individual liberty take on the trappings of the collective mind such that so much of life today is lived through the state?”

How quaint. Is there anything today that is not fit for government’s attention? Large sodas and restaurant menus have lately garnered notice. Retirement, health care, day care, wages, rents, prices, charity, even public radio and television—all that and so much more is the regular business of modern American government because, as President Obama has so often put it, “We’re all in this together.” Indeed, “we sometimes forget,” he told Ohio State graduates last spring, “the larger bonds we share, as one American family.” The family vacation of old springs to mind: Do we go to the mountains or the beach? If we’re all in this together, we can’t go our separate ways.

So how did a nation conceived in and dedicated to individual liberty take on the trappings of the collective mind such that so much of life today is lived through the state, as in the Obama campaign’s much parodied “Life of Julia” cartoon? How did we go from limited government to Leviathan, from the dominance of the private to that of the public sphere? Elements of both have been with us from the beginning, of course, but the presumption at the outset and long thereafter was for private, not public, initiative. That’s no longer true. Got a problem? Washington has a solution. Politics today is ubiquitous.

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