Argumentative Essay: The Dangerous Expansion of Federal Power

In 1995, there was great consternation when the Supreme Court ruled that carrying a gun near a school was not interstate commerce. On May 15, 2000, there was great consternation when the Supreme Court ruled that rape was not interstate commerce. It is a sign of how twisted the law has become that each of these common sense rulings was by a narrow 5 to 4 majority.

While the 1995 case involved a federal law against carrying a gun within a certain distance of a school, this year's case involved a woman suing two men for rape under a federal law. Neither case was about whether the law was good or bad. The cases were about Constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government -- and all our freedoms depend upon maintaining those limits.

The feds have been getting around the Constitutional limits by claiming to be regulating interstate commerce. But the Supreme Court didn't buy it.

Rape is already illegal in every state. What the recent ruling said in effect was: You are in the wrong courthouse, lady. Sue those so-and-so's in the state courthouse down the street. State courts have the power to do everything up to and including executing people, so sending a case to a state court is no wrist slap.

Why does it matter whether a case is tried in a federal court or a state or local court? It matters because a concentration of power is dangerous. The people who wrote the Constitution of the United States understood that -- and feared that -- even if too many of us today do not.

The familiar division of federal power among the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court was just the beginning. The Constitution also made it possible to impeach anybody who abused his power. In addition, the crucial 10th Amendment to the Constitution said that the federal government had the power to do only what it was specifically authorized to do, while the people or the states could do whatever they were not specifically forbidden to do.

This was understood for about 150 years. Then, during the heady days of the New Deal, the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce was stretched to include virtually anything that the politicians in Washington chose to regulate. In one case, the federal government's agricultural laws were applied to a man who grew his own food in his own backyard.