Posted on 12/12/2010 11:50:05 AM PST by neverdem
America is choking on laws of our own making.
Once a law is in place in the United States, it's almost impossible to dislodge. Our political class assumes that, after a law is forged in the crucible of democracy, it should be honored as if it's one of the Ten Commandments - except it's more like one of 10 million...
--snip--
Sunset laws have been proposed from time to time, and they were a domestic priority for President Jimmy Carter. "Too many Federal programs have been allowed to continue indefinitely," he wrote to Congress in 1979, "without examining whether they are accomplishing what they were meant to do."...
--snip--
Americans know that the government is broken. According to a recent Clarus Research Group poll, 80 percent agree with that conclusion. By the same overwhelming majority, Americans also agree that the government "needs a basic overhaul" and should undertake "an annual 'spring cleaning' to eliminate unnecessary regulations and red tape."
Our founders never intended democracy to be a one-way ratchet, making laws but almost never unmaking them. Thomas Jefferson famously advocated small revolutions from time to time, believing that they are "as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. . . . It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." This is the medicine that America very much needs today.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I like it.
Excellent op-ed and an excellent quote from Atlas Shrugged. I would have liked to see lawyer author embrace at least the spirit of Paul Ryan’s Roadmap. This guy’s idea of sunsetting combined with Ryan’s Roadmap are both required for getting this country back on a path to sanity, liberty and growth.
Maybe its time to stop being fearful of where we are heading and look at it as a necessary pothole in the ground that we all have to pitch in to fill it...
I’m going to start looking at our future with more concern and do what I can to encourage a little bit more than just civic duty at the polls...
We need to ALL be on our elected officials arses telling them what we think of some of the actions (bills) they are proposing and debating at the time...Don’t let up for a second...Now is not the time to be resting on our laurels thinking we are going to be smooth sailing till 2012...That attitude is what got us the results starting in 2004, ‘06 and the coup de grau in ‘08...
If anyone thinks their job is over and done with at the polls, I have no use for you, and neither does the rest of the country...
The people who started this Representative Republic weren’t just sitting around talking about it and writing some pretty good stuff on paper...While some were doing that, others were molding musket balls...And that is a figure of speech (from a certain point of view)...
While we have in place some folks who are yammering up the issues now on our side of the political pendulum swing...What we need to be doing is keeping the pressure on those we know who will waiver and not be doing the things within the confines of the Constitution...
If they need to be branded for not doing so...Well, so be it...That opportunity comes around every two years...There are a lot more of us than them...
/soapbox
The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!”Those who want slavery should have the grace to name it by its proper name. They must face the full meaning of that which they are advocating or condemning; the full, exact, specific meaning of collectivism, of its logical implications, of the principles upon which it is based, and of the ultimate consequences to which these principles will lead.
–Ayn Rand
This is what me must say to those who make excuses for and support the collectivist monsters who now control the White House. 0bama challenged his followers to get in our faces. We must in turn get in their faces with this sentiment and these ideas.
The judgement of history has been exceedingly harsh upon those whose bland acceptance of the collectivist path that those behind 0bama are orchestrating for this nation have voted and applauded into power. They mean to destroy this nation, and they have proceeded almost unchecked upon this path.
Obama supporters - and the Ruling Class Republicans - have accepted collectivism and the premises of the ideas that support it. Like it or not (and perhaps they do), know it or not (and perhaps they don’t care), they have opted for slavery of the most insidious sort. Those choices have consequences. Regardless of what they may think, they are exempt from none of them.
There are those who believe that they have a Get Out of History Free card. Nothing could be further from the truth. And no one will be more surprised than the ruling class elites and their supporters when they discover that no, they are manifestly NOT exempt from the consequences of their very bad ideas...
THAT's the message that we must get across. And that the Ruling Class writ doesn't run here. Defiance, non-compliance and ultimately armed resistance to their dictat will follow. Because the alternative is unthinkable.
You know, we can even weigh our laws now.
The printed enumerated ordnances as could be used as weights, we got so many.
There ought to be a law against lawmakers.
And when required, For every new one they pass, deepsix a hundred.
The only sunset is on our dangerous liberties.
Amazing that Carter proposed sunset clauses in laws, since his CRA is the basis for the mnelt-down in the mortgage industry.
I figured that. Juvenile attempt at humor on my part. An amazing number of people make similar errors and I just find them funny. I seem to be about the only person who does.
That said, I seriously doubt 8% would run even the government most conservatives would want to see.
Thomas Jefferson put a similar question as follows:
"It is not only vain, but wicked in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Crimes Bill, 1779. Papers 2:502
Three Felonies a Day:
The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
“The we need to get something done syndrome. No, they need to get a lot Undone.”
There’s nothing worse than a hard working legislator.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.