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9/3/2009
Byrne: With strings attached
When the American colonies won their independence, they organized the federal government and defined it in the Constitution of the United States of America, calling for a government without a royal sovereign and with protections for the rights of member states.
Satirist Washington Irving had doubts about the effectiveness of an elected president being less sovereign than a member of a royal family. In 1819, he published Rip Van Winkle to express his concern. Protagonist Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in a cave and awakens 20 years later. When he fell asleep, America was a colony of the British. When he wakes up, it is the independent United States of America. Van Winkle goes back to his favorite pub and sees a portrait of George Washington where a portrait of King George formerly was displayed.
He doesn’t notice the difference – and thus the political allegory.
The U.S. Constitution establishes the rights of states, allowing them every right not reserved to the federal government. That has changed over the years, not by amendment to the Constitution, but by subterfuge. The corruption has come through the flow of money, both at the state level and federal levels.
Here is how it has been carried out.- The federal government taxes its citizens and businesses for far more money than is required for federal operations.
- These excess revenues are then offered to the states and local governments, generally in the form of grants.
- These funds then require the recipient governments to follow the wishes of the federal government.
- The federal government uses this “purse string power” to require states to adopt highways speed limits, for example, and blood alcohol definitions of intoxicated driving, taking those decisions away from the states by financial coercion.
- Even though the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government no role in education, federal grants to states, colleges and local schools impose acceptance of federal mandates and rules. No compliance, no money.
Through financial coercion and dependency, the federal government has effectively done an end-run around states rights and local control.
The state government in Wisconsin has done the same thing. It is most noticeable in public education, where the state uses shared revenues to fund about two-thirds of local school operations. Accepting the money, though, requires schools to comply with regulations promulgated by the state. In addition, state revenue limits effectively prohibit local school districts from raising the revenues they need to operate schools without state aids.
The entire situation of financial control has accomplished a centralization of power in the federal government contrary to the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, while still maintaining an illusion of states rights and local control.
Originally, the federal government taxed only for its own operating needs. The states taxed only for their needs. The local entities - counties, municipalities and school districts - taxed for their needs. No government was financially dependent on a higher level of government to fund its operations. Federal disbursements of funds to states have abrogated states rights and state disbursements to local levels of government have taken away local control. The end result has been a loss of local control and creation of an all-inclusive central government, a model far different from the model enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
When southern states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America, the CSA constitution went further in protecting states rights than did the U.S. Constitution, as it addressed the use of federal revenue and prohibited the federal government from raising revenues in one state to benefit another state.
Ironically, the Confederate constitution also addressed the concerns of Washington Irving. It limited the president to one six-year term of office and prohibited him from a second term of office. The U.S. Constitution was amended in 1951 - fully 90 years after the Confederate constitution - to limit president to no more than two four-year terms of office.
Ed Byrne is a reporter for the Wrightstown Post-Gazette.
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