“...but we can’t help but think it is also a path toward the elimination of civil rights, workplace protections, enforcement of food and drug standards, interstate commerce, and a few other huge responsibilities that more than 200 years as a nation have already taught us are a necessary role for the federal government.”
Apart from (arguably) the civil rights protections, nothing else championed for retention by the progressives and socialists are within the enumerated powers of the Constitution, as it stands. If these gasbags of the left want to enshrine their damnable EPA, Depts of Education, Agriculture, Energy, and on and on and on, they should get on board the convention train.
Hear hear.
It’s a leftist reflexive knee jerk assumption that the federal government is all that prevents the states from reimplementing segregation.
Most believe this, and a lot also know that this is the most effective weapon to discredit any states’ rights momentum.
My wife and I just got back from a visit to Hoover Dam. We traveled on the Interstate Highway system to get there and back. As I thought about it, it seemed to me that the federal government can get two things right:
1) Things that are made to last,
2) Things that obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Dept of Education works against both, as do EPA, Health and Human Services, and most other agencies. Wind and solar still can’t beat the thermodynamics thingy. Homeland Security? Please... The govt should not be allowed to toss away money on them.
Defense seems to be an enumerated role for the feds, but lately, like since Korea, I’m not so sure they are up to it.
My socialist acquaintances love to point at the highway system as ‘socialistic,’ and evidence that the federal govt is a wonderful thing. Straw man.