Most government programs unconstitutional

Every few days we can read or hear that five Justices of the United States Supreme Court have instructed the other four in the true meaning of the Constitution.

The Constitution is in little-bitty print in the back of my high school civics text. We never read it. We were assigned to read paragraphs written by the learned justices about what this or that "clause" meant in this or that "case".

When I was an old man I mailed in a dollar for a copy of the Constitution. The complete text came in a little shirt-pocket pamphlet, along with the Declaration of Independence and The Ten Commandments.

The Constitution is not what I had thought. It is a sort of laundry-list of things the government may do and things it may not do. (It is a law that the people passed and that the government must obey.)

In the immortal words of Dan Smoot, "The government may do this, and this, and this. And it may not do that, or that, or that. The Ninth and Tenth Amendment, taken together, mean 'and in case we forgot anything, you can't do that either'."

The Constitution specifies that the national government may only do the two dozen specific things it says (like operate armies, navies, post offices and a patent office). That means that every other program is unlawful and unconstitutional.

There are some ugly names for governments that do whatever they want. "Totalitarian" comes to mind. Even if they get us to call for something unconstitutional, it is still unconstitutional and unlawful.

Glenn Jacobs

Eagar, Ariz.

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