The Tyranny of our Ever Expanding Government

“Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?” — James Madison, Federalist No. 62 — 1788

When writing about the tyranny of a mutable government and the legislature passing long and complicated laws of which no one could comprehend and obey James Madison raises the very forceful point. He stated that citizens will find it very difficult to obey the law if it is constantly changing (“mutable government”), either by growing enormously in size to be beyond the grasp ordinary people, or by being incoherent, or being repealed or revised before they are promulgated.

Today we have the situation where massive and complicated laws, like ObamaCare (over 3,000 pages) are passed without having been read or debated by the legislators themselves, let alone discussed in the press and by the people. When this sad state has been reached, the law itself, as Madison eloquently says, “poisons the blessings of liberty.” James Madison stated in Federalist No. 62:

“To trace the mischievous effects of a mutable government would fill a volume. I will hint a few only, each of which will be perceived to be a source of innumerable others.

In the first place, it forfeits the respect and confidence of other nations, and all the advantages connected with national character. An individual who is observed to be inconstant to his plans, or perhaps to carry on his affairs without any plan at all, is marked at once by all prudent people, as a speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his: and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his. One nation is to another, what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former, with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage of the indiscretions of each other. Every nation, consequently, whose affairs betray a want of wisdom and stability, may calculate on every loss which can be sustained from the more systematic policy of its wiser neighbors. But the best instruction on this subject is unhappily conveyed to America by the example of her own situation. She finds that she is held in no respect by her friends; that she is the derision of her enemies; and that she is a prey to every nation which has an interest in speculating on her fluctuating councils and embarrassed affairs.

The internal effects of a mutable policy are still more calamitous. It poisons the blessing of liberty itself. It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?

Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uniformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any way affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace its consequences; a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow-citizens. This is a state of things in which it may be said with some truth that laws are made for the FEW, not for the MANY.

In another point of view, great injury results from an unstable government. The want of confidence in the public councils damps every useful undertaking, the success and profit of which may depend on a continuance of existing arrangements. What prudent merchant will hazard his fortunes in any new branch of commerce when he knows not but that his plans may be rendered unlawful before they can be executed? What farmer or manufacturer will lay himself out for the encouragement given to any particular cultivation or establishment, when he can have no assurance that his preparatory labors and advances will not render him a victim to an inconstant government? In a word, no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy.

But the most deplorable effect of all is that diminution of attachment and reverence which steals into the hearts of the people, towards a political system which betrays so many marks of infirmity, and disappoints so many of their flattering hopes. No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable; nor be truly respectable, without possessing a certain portion of order and stability.”

In Federalist Paper 10, probably the most important of the Federalist Papers, James Madison, writing as Publius, addresses the Tyranny of the Majority trough Factions.

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true.”

As I have stated in previous blogs in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.” In this context, it is irrelevant who resides in the White House or holds the House speaker’s gavel. America is not a nation of laws, but of rules. Only a renewed cultural will to true reform, coupled with political leadership, can correct that.

Today we are experiences the worst of our Founder’s fears. An unfettered executive branch coupled with a legislative branch that is so encumbered with factions that it no longer serves the will of the people. This combination of ills has formed a fourth branch of government — the administrative state.

I have written numerous times about the history and tyrannical effects of the administrative state and how it is slowly destroying the republic our Founders envisioned. The latest egregious example is the Senate passed 1,200 page immigration bill that contains so much pork a pig farmer would have problems weighing it. It contains cars for immigrants to placate Senator Barry Sanders of New Hampshire and subsidies for the Alaskan fishing industry. It states that the counterfeiting of no more than three U.S. passports is not a crime. While allowing for the hiring of 20,000 additional border patrol agents and building a fence along the entire border it gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to cancel the fence construction at any time at their discretion.

Today a landmark Supreme Court ruling that struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act has set up a stand-off between Republican-led states and the Obama administration over controversial voting laws that until now had been stalled.

The 5-4 ruling on Tuesday addressed a 1960s-era provision that largely singled out states and districts in the South — those with a history of discrimination — and required them to seek federal permission to change their voting laws.

The court ruled that the formula determining which states are affected was unconstitutional.

In doing so, the court potentially opened the door for certain states to proceed with voter ID laws and other efforts that to date had been held up because of the Voting Rights Act. Prominent among those are voter identification laws in Alabama and Mississippi.

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder has claimed that he does not agree with the ruling and will continue to do all he can to force states to abide by his edicts

Attorney General Eric Holder warned states against going too far. He said the Justice Department would not hesitate to take "swift" action against states looking to "take advantage" of the ruling.

He, like President Obama, said he was "deeply disappointed" in the decision, saying discriminatory practices live on and need to be addressed.

"These problems have not been consigned to history," Holder said.

Holder and Obama urged Congress to create a new formula.

"Today's decision invalidating one of its core provisions upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent," Obama said.

To read more on this decision click here.

In another example of the power of the administrative state today Obama declared his war on coal even though throughout the 2012 election campaigned he denied such a war on coal or guns.

So much for the denials. An administration that throughout its 2012 election campaign denied it was waging a War on Coal has now come out and publicly declared its intention to shut down coal-fired power plants – putting hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work and sending electricity prices skyrocketing.

This is not what the American people voted for.

Responding to a White House petition to end the War on Coal, the administration said: “The President has made clear that he understands that coal has played a critical role in our country’s energy portfolio for decades and will continue to be an important source of energy in the future.”

Sycophantic liberal media outlets (like The Nation and the Associated Press) went further, repeatedly claiming that the War on Coal was a myth. The Obama campaign even ran a TV ad in Ohio claiming that Mitt Romney would be bad for coal – and trotted out former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland to deny there was a war on coal and echo the attacks on Romney.

Yet today Obama political consultant David Plouffe took to Twitter to bang his chest: “Today's climate announcement underscores that elections matter greatly” – as if Obama had campaigned on shutting down coal plants instead of on denying his intention to do so.

Such denials are no longer necessary. Today a top Obama global warming adviser told The New York Times the denials were just election-year politics. Daniel Schrag said: “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.

And Obama delivered. It’s right there on page 19 of his Climate Action Plan: “Going forward, we will promote fuel-switching from coal to gas for electricity production.”

Indeed, Obama made clear in his speech that he intends to impose regulations on existing coal plants that can only be met through carbon capture and storage (technology that doesn’t exist on a commercial scale), switching to natural gas, or shutting down completely.

Coal still produces 37 percent of U.S. electricity. A Heritage Foundation analysis found that implementing Obama’s proposed regulation on existing coal plants would destroy more than 500,000 jobs, slash the income of a typical family of four more than $1,400 a year, and increase electricity prices at least 20 percent. Price spikes could be much higher in states that depend heavily on coal-fired power plants, especially in the Midwest. President Obama once famously explained that he intended to make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket.”

Obama intends to fight his War on Coal by issuing a Presidential Memorandum to the EPA to issue regulations under the 1970 Clean Air Act. This is despite the fact that the law’s principal author, Democrat John Dingell of Michigan, famously said: “This is not what was intended by the Congress and by those of us who wrote the Clean Air Act. We are beginning to look at a wonderfully complex world, which has the potential for shutting down or slowing down virtually all industry and all economic activity and growth.”

And there is zero global warming benefit to go with all the economic costs, because even if all United States greenhouse gas emissions were shut down to zero tomorrow, the rest of the world would keep on puffing. Paul Knappenberger recently calculated, based on standard assumptions, that getting to zero emissions in the U.S. immediately would only reduce global average temperatures an imperceptible 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050. Moreover, the rest of the world would replace all U.S. emissions within seven years.

So it’s all pain and no gain — by legally dubious means — to accomplish the opposite of what Obama promised on the campaign trail. Congress should take exception to being circumvented and step in to stop Obama’s (now-declared) War on Coal.

Once again it is plain to see that complex laws passed by a willing legislature leave the door open for the executive branch to do just about anything it wants under the color of law. This is truly a feature of the administrative state where the masterminds call the shots and self-government is a thing of the past. So much for the Republic Mr. Franklin.

On the other hand 62 Tea Party representatives dealt a blow to the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives when they gather enough support to defeat an overblown Farm Bill on June 20^th.

The GOP leadership suffered a stunning defeat as 62 Republicans voted against the 5-year farm bill (H.R. 1947), which locks in the record baseline of food stamp spending and creates multiple new agriculture subsidy programs. A handful of them voted against it because it cut too much spending, and others like Bill Shuster voted no because they are facing potential primary challenges (Shuster voted for the 2008 bill). But this is a strong showing, as it is a dynamic none of us would have ever predicted several years ago.

Some Republicans are complaining that because of the conservative revolt we will now continue on the status quo with direct farm subsidies. But they fail to understand that the new price support programs and shallow loss coverage that were created by this bill would have been more expensive and represent worse market distortions than direct subsidies. It’s better to reauthorize the status quo than to pass a long-term bill that creates even more problems and precludes real reforms for another 5 years.

Other Republicans complain that now we will face the so-called milk cliff. Pursuant to a silly 1949 act of Congress, every time we fail to renew expiring farm programs, the government must begin imposing Soviet-style price controls on milk by decreasing supplies through massive purchases of milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products. Under permanent law, the USDA would begin purchasing dairy products at a rate of $38.54 per hundredweight; more than double the current price ($18 per hundredweight). This market manipulation could double the price of milk, dairy products, and everything else up the food chain.

But instead of avoiding the deleterious effects of the Agriculture Act of 1949 by growing government, why don’t we just repeal the damn law?

In a sane world, both houses of Congress would convene and repeal this inane and outdated law within a few minutes by unanimous consent. That way we could debate a long-term farm bill without having the sword of the 1949 law brandished over our necks and forcing Congress to rush through bad legislation.

However, Congress is not sane, and they have no plans to repeal the law. In fact, Paul Broun introduced an amendment to do just that, but all the Democrats and more than half of Republicans voted it down.

The latest ephemeral trend in Washington is to create a contrived crisis for the purpose of growing government, increasing spending, or raising taxes. The new “milk cliff” is just the latest in the bag of tricks held by the permanent statist class.

Moving forward, we must split up the farm bill into two components; food stamps and agriculture programs. Food stamps must be devolved to the states and most agricultural subsidies need to be means-tested and charted on a gradual course towards elimination. And most of all, the dairy supply control system must be repealed once and for all in a standalone piece of legislation.

That would represent responsible conservative reform that is becoming of a GOP-controlled House. Working harder to buy off Democrats with more spending increases is not the way forward. If Kevin McCarthy and Eric Cantor desire to grow government with Democrat support, maybe they should run for the Pelosi whip team.

The American people elected a Republican House to provide a bold contrast to the Obama-Pelosi agenda, not to work behind the scenes to help grow government with their support.

You can read more about the defeat of the trillion dollar food stamp and farm bill by clicking here.

One of the things all tyrannical regimes such as the administrative state does is to compile a list of enemies. These enemies are defined as those who do not agree with their policies and could pose a threat to their agenda.

The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides.

No matter; the National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for selling lethal semi-automatic weapons to drug cartels. But so far, the only identifiable purveyor of illegal weaponry is the president’s own attorney general, whose subordinates in the Fast and Furious operation sold hundreds of guns illegally to Mexican drug lords.

Suggestions to encourage greater incarceration of the mentally unstable, to jawbone Hollywood about its profitable (and gratuitous) gun violence, to regulate extremely violent — and extremely well-selling — video games usually fall on deaf liberal ears. In short, the stereotyped camouflaged, weekend gun enthusiast is not the problem that leads to Columbine, or the nearly 532 murders last year in Chicago. But because we can’t or won’t address the causes of the latter, we go after the former. He is not the unhinged sort that shoots a Gabby Giffords or innocents in an Aurora, Colorado, theater; but somehow is the supposed red-neck yokel that a journalist like ABC’s Brian Ross assumes does.

If the Department of Homeland Security, as is rumored, really did wish to stockpile hundreds of millions of rounds of ammunition, then why did it begin such repository buying right in the middle of a hysterical national debate about limiting access to various rifles and semi-automatic weapons? Was it not to create a climate of fear and panic buying that has emptied America’s shelves of the most popular types of ammunition? If the homicide rate in Philadelphia and Chicago is any indication, murderers still have plenty of access to bullets. Those who want to target practice or shoot a varmint on their property do not.

The CIA and FBI knew of the suspicious activity of the Boston bombers, of Major Hasan, and of Anwar al-Awlaki. And they did nothing to preempt their violence. The FBI is said to be carefully avoiding monitoring mosques, although all of the above terrorists were known by many fellow Muslim worshipers to be either disturbed or extremist or both. In contrast, the NSA monitors, we are told, nearly everyone’s communications rather than focusing on Middle Eastern male Muslims, even though Middle Eastern male Muslims have been involved in the vast majority of post-9/11 terrorist plots. The NSA is the electronic version of the TSA, which feels it is noble and liberal to stop an octogenarian in a wheel chair for special frisking as proper compensation for every focused look at a West Bank resident or Pakistani visitor on his way into the United States.

The words “Tea Party” and “patriot” in a non-profit’s name would more likely earn a negative appraisal from the IRS than would “Islam” or “Muslim.” One wonders how Lois Lerner’s IRS division would treat a hypothetical “Sarah Palin Foundation” versus “The Dr. Zawahiri Charity.”

The IRS is not worried at all about 47% of the nation who pay no federal income taxes. The vast majority of those whom it focuses on are instead the 10% who pay over 70% of all taxes. These are the would-be proverbial “fat cats” who did not build their own businesses. They are reluctant to spread their wealth. They certainly did not know either when to stop making money or when the age of profit altogether had passed. Sometime around 2009 success was deemed failure, and failure success — at least if we collate the president fat-cat rhetoric with the vast expansion in the disability, food-stamp, and unemployment-insurance rolls.

Note that the IRS is not interested in leaking to Democrat senators or former administration official rumors about George Soros’s income or the details of the tax returns of Warren Buffett, Steven Spielberg, or Bill Gates. Instead, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate bragged that he knew (falsely as it turned out) that Mitt Romney paid no income taxes. And former high administration official Austan Goolsbee claimed (also falsely as it turned out) that he too knew that the Koch brothers were shorting the IRS.

Note that only liberal groups like ProPublica leak information about the confidential donor lists of conservative activists, apparently given their familiar arrangement with the IRS. So far IRS chiefs are not looking at prominent Democrat politicians for tax violations, although for a time — cf. Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle, Hilda Solis — that might have been a fruitful profile for inquiry. (One encouraging side note: if you are a suspect white, mature, well-off, conservative, heterosexual, Christian male, you can still obtain exemption from federal suspicion by loudly announcing that you also are enthralled by Barack Obama.)

We know who was not an administration suspect in the killing of four Americans in Benghazi — hard-core, al Qaeda-related Islamic terrorists. Instead a supposedly right-wing unhinged video-maker was the object of vitriol from the secretary of state, the UN ambassador, and the president of the United States. He currently sits in jail. The known perpetrators of the murders walk free. In contrast, Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, just got a fat inside job from Apple, despite creating not just a fictitious name (e.g., “Richard Windsor”) to avoid scrutiny when she communicated official business, but also an entirely made-up alter ego: “Richard Windsor” became an ideal employee lauded by the unethical EPA for his supposedly “ethical behavior.”

We also know who in the media is not a target. Not the CBS or ABC News presidents who have siblings working in the White House. Not ABC’s Good Morning America, given that one of its stalwarts is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney. Instead, there are two sorts of suspicious reporters that are considered hostile to the administration and worthy of having their communications monitored. One group are those journalists who leak information that the administration wished to preempt and leak first or who refuse to only leak favorable classified information — the bin Laden trove, the cyber war against Iran, the drone targeting protocol — that makes the president look as if he were a competent commander in chief.

The other target, of course, is Fox News, whose staff, in a variety of ways and on a number of occasions, the Obama administration has previously attacked as in some way illegitimate.

Again, who fits these profiles that our current, vastly expanding big government does not like? If you are an operator of a coal plant that creates needed energy at a profit, then beware that the EPA is after you. If you are a shady insider who wants tens of millions of government dollars to subsidize a money-losing wind and solar plant, you hit the jackpot. Ditto the suspect people who build guitars, loan money to Chrysler, or wish to locate a jet airliner plant in South Carolina. Profits create suspicion; failures earn subsidies.

Then there are the clingers, whom the president long ago blasted as religious zealots and gun-toting xenophobes. These are the sorts whom the attorney general calls “cowards” (not “my people”) — the “enemies” whom the president advises Latino activists to “punish” at the polls, the sorts that the president apologizes for abroad as guilty of sundry sorts of past class, race, and gender oppression.

In contrast, who is not so worried about government surveillance or audit? The New Black Panthers who turned up at a polling station in Philadelphia to intimidate voters; the “farmers” who, according to the New York Times, filed bogus claims to cash in on the government’s ill-advised and poorly administered Pigford settlement; the Secret Service agents who routinely visited prostitutes while on duty protecting high government officials abroad; and the assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who used her office to enhance her private consulting business.

Americans wonder whom would the immigration services more likely wish to deport: the German Romeike family that was “guilty” of homeschooling their children; Obama’s aunt Zeituni, who lied about her immigration status to illegally obtain state and federal subsidies; or Onyango Obama, who likewise is here illegally (for 21 years) and was recently charged with ramming a police car while driving intoxicated? Is the U.S. so short of DUI offenders and frauds that we must deport homeschoolers to make room for them?

There is currently a climate of fear growing throughout the United States. Millions of Americans are terrified of the IRS, the Department of Justice, the EPA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and even perhaps the FBI, CIA, and State Department.

Why?

These government agencies have never been bigger, more powerful, and more ideologically driven. Citizens fear them for understandable reasons: those who do nothing wrong, whether in filing tax forms or trying to buy a rifle, are considered suspect and deserving to be the target of either federal scrutiny or presidential slurs. But those who do a great deal of wrong, either by illegally entering the country, disrupting polling, trafficking in weapons in Mexico, eavesdropping on American citizens, pulling tax information for partisan purposes, subverting a government agency, or lying to the public about government activity, seem exempt from punishment — and, more chillingly, sense that they are so exempt.

Ask who now is sitting in prison — a shyster video-maker who had nothing to do with the deaths of four Americans, or their five known terrorist killers lounging about in North Africa? Apparently, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, like EPA director Lisa Jackson, was guilty of creating a fake persona. Like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, he had a lien on her business. Like former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he had some unpaid taxes. Like Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he had been visited by government investigators. Like Attorney General Eric Holder and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, he lied to federal authorities — although they were not quite as high as those in the U.S. Congress. And unlike all of the above, he was therefore jailed.

Of all the legacies of Barack Obama, the most pernicious will be the creation of a rogue government that has cut off and terrified half the population — and for no other reason than that they seem to represent things that Mr. Obama simply does not seem to understand.

The truth is that governments are always like pitchers trying to pitch out of a jam with all the bases loaded. We the people want a little free stuff. The ruling class wants to seize and hold political power. Promising free stuff is how you get elected. This what James Madison knew when he authored Federalist No. 10.

Usually, those vote-buying promises result in policies that damage the economy. President Obama has been worse than most. The result is that politicians and their officials are always involved in trying to Band-Aid over the distortions and the wounds they have inflicted on the economy and our freedoms in their crude bid for power.

The Transformation of America’s Political Institutions

“We are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.” — Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1913.

In 1913 Woodrow Wilson gave a speech entitled “The Old Order Changeth” as a part of his New Freedom series. In speech Wilson stated:

“We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, "Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else." We used to say that the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”

Wilson, while a fan of Thomas Jefferson, did not believe that the United States could survive in the new industrial world by adhering to the outdated model of the Constitution. He believed we needed a new system of leadership where the executive was the political leader of the nation and we needed a cadre of experts to run his new administrative state. This was to be the model for the progressive liberalism’s transformation of America’s political institutions from Madison’s constitutional republic, where laws were made by the legislature, to an administrative state where laws and regulations came down from the executive branch through the hands of commissions of experts and masterminds.

Progressives undertook the transformation of America’s political institutions—in particular the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches—to reflect their understanding that government is divided into politics (representation of the will of the people) and administration (development and implementation of civic policies and programs determined by scientific expertise and masterminds). This administrative system, in which Congress delegates its lawmaking authority to regulatory agencies, replaces the centrality of the consent of the governed with the rule of unelected, bureaucratic experts.

As a direct consequence of the idea that government should adapt to the changing needs of modern industrial society, Progressives have transformed the functions of American political institutions and, in so doing, have expanded the power of government. Jettisoning the Founders’ understanding of the purpose of separation of powers (to prevent the tyranny of the passions by enabling reasoned deliberation in legislative matters), Progressives transformed the three branches of government to reflect their desire for a division between politics and administration.

The business of elected politicians, the Progressives held, is to give expression to the will of the people. However, ultimately motivated by their own desire for reelection, politicians merely represent the special private interests of their immediate constituents. Lacking the technical expertise and training required by the complexities of rulemaking in a modern society, members of Congress delegate their lawmaking power to the nonpartisan, bureaucratic experts who staff administrative agencies. In turn, these experts formulate the policies and regulations governing the daily life of citizens.

The Executive and Judicial branches likewise have undergone a transformation. The President is now viewed as the nation’s legislative leader. His primary responsibility is to rally public opinion around certain proposals, and to secure their enactment. He is only secondarily responsible for the execution of laws. The federal Judiciary also currently exhibits the Progressive understanding of its function that the Judicial branch should be thought of as an administrative agency whose expertise is the Constitution. This expertise authorizes it to determine the ultimate meaning of the Constitution, in accordance with the needs of the times and the realities of progress.

In Federalist 49 James Madison wrote:

“The executive power might be in the hands of a peculiar favorite of the people. In such a posture of things, the public decision might be less swayed by prepossessions in favor of the legislative party. But still it could never be expected to turn on the true merits of the question. It would inevitably be connected with the spirit of pre-existing parties, or of parties springing out of the question itself. It would be connected with persons of distinguished character and extensive influence in the community. It would be pronounced by the very men who had been agents in, or opponents of, the measures to which the decision would relate. The PASSIONS, therefore, not the REASON, of the public would sit in judgment. But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”

But by 1913 the liberal/progressives believed as Frank Goodnow and Woodrow Wilson had stated the political leader of the nation should be the president who would respond to the WILL of the people and that administration should be the execution of that will. As you can see this is in total contradiction to what our Founders believed and wrote in the Constitution. The Constitution gives all power to make laws to the legislative body and limited powers to the executive. In essence it is the responsibility of the executive to carry out the laws passed by Congress.

In 1915 Herbert Croly (the co-founder of The New Republic) wrote in his essay Progressive Democracy:

“The mechanism of direct government has, consequently, an essential function to perform in the organization of a social democracy. The realization of a genuine social policy necessitates the aggrandizement of the administrative and legislative branches of the government. Progressive democracy recognizes the need of these instruments, but it recognizes the need of keeping control of them. A strong government with an affirmative policy and effective popular control are supplementary rather than hostile one to another. The realization of such a policy will in the long run demand both an efficient system of representation and an efficient method of direct popular supervision.

…

““Democracy implies and needs some method of representation which will be efficient and responsible enough to carry out a social policy, but which does not imply the delegation of its own ultimate discretionary power to any body of men or body of law. The new system can accomplish nothing without human energy, intelligence, sacrifice and faith, but if those qualities are present, it will make the best use of them.”

…

“In all three of the principal departments of government, there are essential functions to be performed which must be delegated by a democracy to selected men under conditions which make for technical efficiency and individual independence and self-respect. The Fathers of the Republic were fully justified both in keeping the powers distinguished, and in seeking to balance one against the other. Their mistake consisted in the methods adopted for preserving or readjusting the balance. The preservation of a balance depends upon the harmonious development of several elements which enter into it; and as in the course of nature harmonious development is rare, the preservation of any such balance must usually be contrived by human insistence and intelligence. Only one part of a democratic system is entitled to exercise any such function—the electorate itself. The whole of a democratic political system is divided into three parts, not merely or primarily as a protection to individual and popular liberties, but rather to provide an essential positive individual and popular liberties, but rather to provide an essential positive function for the people to perform—the function of recreating the unity which is necessarily compromised by the no less necessary specialization of governmental function. Such is the part which the people, or the closest possible approximation to the people, have to play in the process of their own nationalization or socialization. They must divide in order to act, to think, to rule, to move on and to aspire; but they must not impose upon any one of the resulting classifications or subdivisions the responsibility of ultimate social cohesion. That responsibility rests with the whole people, and its fulfillment depends upon popular intelligence, sympathy and faith.”

This is in total contradiction to Madison’s beliefs, as expressed I his famous Federalist No. 10 where he spoke of “factions” and “passions” of the people and made the case for a constitutional republic with a bi-cameral legislature and a “check and balance” between the three branches of government with the legislative being the most powerful due to their budgetary control and the judiciary being the least. Madison wrote:

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

…

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.”

Today we live in an administrative state where Congress’ primary function is Constituent services. Our representatives pass broad conceptual laws and then leave the interpretation and enforcement to the experts and masterminds of the administrative state. These bureaucratic experts outlive Congresses and Presidents and are the real power in the United States.

An example is the EPA. When Congress passed the clean water act they had no idea as to how the masterminds at the EPA would interpret, create regulations and enforce them. This was clearly demonstrated when an Idaho couple decided to build a house on their property on which there was a small inland lake. Not only did the EPA prevent them from building their dream home on their own property they also prevented them from having a hearing and going to court to plead their case. Fortunately the Supreme Court granted certiorari and heard their case after the Ninth Circuit Court rejected their case. In Sackett v. United States Environmental Protection Agency the Supreme Court, by a decision of 9-0, rejected the decision of the Ninth Circuit Court and ruled against the EPA.

In his opinion Justice Alito noted in this case “real relief” must come from Congress. The Clean Water Act does not contain clear rules regarding procedure. No one really knows what a wetland is. The EPA takes advantage of the lack of clarity and, like any bureaucracy, grabs power. This is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. As Congress has not seen fit to clean it up over the decades, it is unlikely to do so now.

The problem is for the Sacketts is that they won the right to sue the EPA, but not the right to build their home. This is another battle that needs to be fought against the masterminds of the EPA and the administrative state.

As I have written before the liberal/progressives, the advocates of the administrative state, believe as Wilson that the Constitutions is outmoded and is what is holding the nation back from moving forward. Sanford Levinson, a professor of law and government at the University of Texas, Austin believes the Constitution is “Imbecilic.” He writes in his article, “Our Imbecilic Constitution:”

“Our vaunted system of ‘separation of powers’ and ‘checks and balances’—a legacy of the founders’ mistrust of ‘factions’—means that we rarely have anything that can truly be described as a ‘government.’ Save for those rare instances when one party has hefty control over four branches—the House of Representatives, the Senate, the White House and the Supreme Court—gridlock threatens. Elections are increasingly meaningless, at least in terms of producing results commensurate with the challenges facing the country.

“But if one must choose the worst single part of the Constitution, it is surely Article V, which has made our Constitution among the most difficult to amend of any in the world. The last truly significant constitutional change was the 22nd Amendment, added in 1951, to limit presidents to two terms. The near impossibility of amending the national Constitution not only prevents needed reforms; it also makes discussion seem futile and generates a complacent denial that there is anything to be concerned about.”

And then we have Supreme Court Justice William Brennan stating at a Text and Teaching Symposium:

“We current Justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as Twentieth Century Americans. We look to the history of the time of framing and to the intervening history of interpretation. But the ultimate question must be, what do the words of the text mean in our time. For the genius of the Constitution rests not in any static meaning it might have had in a world that is dead and gone, but in the adaptability of its great principles to cope with current problems and current needs. What the constitutional fundamentals meant to the wisdom of other times cannot be their measure to the vision of our time. Similarly, what those fundamentals mean for us, our descendants will learn, cannot be the measure to the vision of their time.

Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore, a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is peculiarly true of constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice John Marshall, ‘designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.’ The future is their care and provision or events of good and bad tendencies of which no prophesy can be made. In the application of a constitution, therefore, our contemplation cannot be only of what has been, but of what may be.

Interpretation must account for the transformative purpose of the text. Our Constitution

was not intended to preserve a preexisting society but to make a new one, to put in place new principles that the prior political community had not sufficiently recognized. Thus, for example, when we interpret the Civil War Amendments to the charter-abolishing slavery, guaranteeing blacks equality under law, and guaranteeing blacks the right to vote-we must remember that those who put them in place had no desire to enshrine the status quo. Their goal was to make over their world, to eliminate all vestige of slave caste.

There are those who find legitimacy in fidelity to what they call the ‘intentions of the Framers.’ But in truth it is little more than arrogance cloaked in humility. It is arrogance to pretend that from our vantage we can gauge accurately the intent of the Framers on application of principle to specific, contemporary questions.”

I guess Justice Brennan, one of the most liberal/progressive justices to sit on the Court, never heard of or reads the Federalists Papers, which give a pretty good idea of what our Founders were thinking.

And then we have the liberal/progressive Thomas Friedman writing about the wonders of China, a totalitarian state in his article “Our One-Party Democracy.”

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.”

Look at the climate/energy bill that came out of the House. Its sponsors had to work twice as hard to produce this breakthrough cap-and-trade legislation. Why? Because with basically no G.O.P. representatives willing to vote for any price on carbon that would stimulate investments in clean energy and energy efficiency, the sponsors had to rely entirely on Democrats — and that meant paying off coal-state and agriculture Democrats with pork. Thank goodness, it is still a bill worth passing. But it could have been much better — and can be in the Senate. Just give me 8 to 10 Republicans ready to impose some price on carbon, and they can be leveraged against Democrats who want to water down the bill.

“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” said Joe Romm, who writes the blog, climateprogress.org.”

I always knew Thomas Friedman was a lefty-progressive, but a believer in a totalitarian dictatorship of experts and masterminds who have complete control over their citizens is quite another matter. No less a figure than Karl Marx argued that administrative bureaucracies would not, in fact, be free of their own self-interests. I wonder how Mr. Friedman would feel if the government began to censor his articles and tell him what he could or could not write under pain of imprisonment.

With the power of the legislature diminishing and the rise of the administrate state the liberal/progressive have no taken to the courts to establish their control over the governed. Most people believe it was Marbury v. Madison that gave the Court power over the constitution. Over the years the Court has ruled on many issues with dubious Constitutionality; Dred Scott, Plessey v Ferguson, Wickard v. Filburn, Korematsu v. United States, and the latest example of the ruling on ObamaCare.

Now our legislation emanates from the bench and the liberal/progressives love it. If they can’t get their agenda through the legislature and the executive does not support them they turn to the bench. The final interpretation of the Constitution is now in the hands of 9 unelected members of the Supreme Court and by a 5-4 decision these justices can write new laws. This proven in the 1958 landmark case of Cooper v. Aaron which held that the states were bound by the Court's decisions and had to enforce them even if the states disagreed with them.

While the progressives hailed the 9-0 decision some legal scholars criticized the Court's rationale in Cooper. Perhaps the most famous criticism of the case was that of a former US Attorney General, Edwin Meese, in his law review article entitled The Law of the Constitution. There, Meese accused the Court of taking too much power for itself by setting itself up as the sole institution responsible for the interpretation of the Constitution. He wrote that while judicial interpretation of the Constitution binds the parties of the case, it should not establish a supreme law of the land that must be accepted by all persons.

In the abstract of his paper presented at the presented at the Citizen's Forum on the Bicentennial of the Constitution (New Orleans, LA, October 21, 1986) Meese states.

“This paper discusses the distinction between the Constitution and constitutional law. The Constitution is the fundamental law of the United States. It creates the institutions of government, enumerates the powers of these institutions, and delineates areas government may not enter. The Constitution is the instrument by which the consent of the governed is transformed into a government. Constitutional law is that body of law which has resulted from the Supreme Court's adjudications involving disputes over constitutional provisions or doctrines. A constitutional law decision does not establish the "supreme Law of the Land" that is binding on all persons and parts of government, henceforth and forevermore. Rather, Constitutional law is the product of judicial interpretation of the supreme law of the land, the Constitution. Officials of the executive and the legislative branches of government also have the duty and responsibility to interpret the Constitution.”

My final quote is from Peter Orszag, Obama’s former formerly Obama's director the Office of Management and Budget (one of those bureaucratic masterminds), and now a vice chairman at Citigroup. He recently penned a column in the New Republic titled: "Too Much of a Good Thing: Why We Need Less Democracy." In which he said:

“THE PROBLEM WITH such commissions is that, like automatic stabilizers and backstop rules, they reduce the power of elected officials and therefore make our government somewhat less accountable to voters. Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution at Stanford puts it this way: “There is something undemocratic about entrusting the formation of big policy decisions to expert commissions.” And yet he also goes on to note that “the process is not less democratic than having nine unelected justices with lifetime tenure and no political accountability to anyone but themselves decide such basic questions as when a woman can have an abortion and where a child can go to school.” He concludes that, despite the risks, rising polarization justifies the increased use of these types of commissions.

As the debt-limit experience vividly illustrated, by polarizing ourselves, we are making our country more ungovernable—and no one has come up with a practical proposal to deal with the consequences. I wish it were not necessary to devise processes to circumvent legislative gridlock, but polarization isn’t going away. John Adams may have been exaggerating when he pessimistically noted that democracies tend to commit suicide, yet, as we are seeing, certain aspects of representative government can end up posing serious problems. And so, we might be a healthier democracy if we were a slightly less democratic one.”

Liberal/progressives, at least since Woodrow Wilson, want to replace the will of the people with the will of the bureaucrats. They want a society run by experts and masterminds — like the ones that run our failed "stimulus," TARP and the Fed.

Fact is, they don't trust you to run your own lives, and they have a barely concealed contempt for the very people who voted them into office. They want to rule you by curbing your democratic rights — by force, if needed.

The consent of the governed is being replaced by the rule of the experts and masterminds of the administrative state. Politicians come and go, but bureaucrats are forever.

The Slow Demise of Coal

"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." — Thomas Jefferson

Obama stated during the 2008 presidential campaign his dislike of coal as a source of energy and his plans to destroy the coal industry. As part of his hope and change mantra he kept pushing “green energy” as part of his transforming America agenda. He said he did not care if energy costs doubled he wanted America to go green. In four years we have not even come close to going green even though the government has wasted billions of dollars on solar and wind power.

Recent news that President Obama's re-election web page on energy policy didn't include coal on the list of "all of the above" energy sources sparked outrage in coal-producing states like Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The website had listed oil, natural gas, bio-fuels, wind, solar power and nuclear power but omitted coal, a fossil fuel that left-wing environmental groups despise.

After criticism from members of Congress and conservative bloggers, the Obama campaign put "clean coal" back on the "all of the above" energy list. The Obama administration now says that coal is an "essential" part of the administration's energy strategy. Coal accounts for 44 percent of electricity production in the United States, and coal mining is a major source of union jobs. Even after the Obama campaign put clean coal back on the list, the attacks and controversy live on, and there is now speculation that Mr. Obama may have done his campaign real damage in battle ground states like Virginia and Ohio.

According to Wikipedia coal accounts for 44.9% of our electrical generation.

Energy Source	Percent
Coal	44.9
Natural Gas	23.4
Nuclear	20.3
Hydro-Electric	6.9
Other Renewables	3.6
Petroleum	1.0

The original decision to leave coal off of the list was exposed by Ed Whitfield, the Republican congressman from Kentucky, who called it a "glaring omission" and relentlessly attacked the Obama campaign for putting coal jobs at risk. Mr. Whitfield has made the case that Mr. Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency have been engaged in a "war on coal." He remains "skeptical" that Obama will "do anything to draw on this resource" and continues to fume at new EPA regulations that threaten to put many coal-burning fire plants out of business.

The Obama campaign gaffe, if it was one, has come at the worst possible time for the president. Republicans in the Senate have been ridiculing his "none of the above" energy strategy. They point to the decision not to build the Keystone pipeline; to the reduction in Interior Department leases for oil and natural gas drilling; to Solyndra-type scandals with renewable energy grants; and to high gas prices.

Even though Obama’s campaign staff has backtracked on their stand on coal the Obama administration, through draconian regulations from the EPA, have slowly been destroying the coal industry causing our costs for electrical energy to go up and displacing thousands of workers — workers who for generations have supported their families by working in the coal industry.

According to a recent report in Bloomberg Patriot Coal, one of the largest producers of coal in the United States, has filed for bankruptcy and terminated over 1,000 jobs. The report states that two of the reasons for Patriot’s actions were the declining cost of natural gas and the increasing cost of coal due to EPA regulations. The report states:

“Patriot Coal Corp. (PCX) sought bankruptcy protection after milder winters and a shift to natural gas sent coal demand to a 24-year low.

The St. Louis-based company’s Chapter 11 petition listed $3.57 billion in assets and $3.07 billion in debts. The filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan said dozens of the company’s units would join in the filing.

“The coal industry is undergoing a major transformation and Patriot’s existing capital structure prevents it from making the necessary adjustments to achieve long-term success,” Chief Executive Officer Irl F. Engelhardt said in a statement that cited lower thermal coal prices, canceled customer contracts and rising costs for environmental liabilities for increasing pressure on the company in recent months.

Patriot already has a loan to finance operations in bankruptcy and expects its mining operations and customer shipments to continue through the case, the company said in its statement. The $802 million loan, which still requires court approval, is through Citigroup Global Markets Inc., Barclays Bank Plc and Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. as joint lead arrangers.

The company intends to “emerge as a viable and strong competitor in the coal industry,” Chief Financial Officer Mark Schroeder said yesterday in court papers. Patriot needs to trim labor costs because of declining prices and demand for coal, along with regulations that will require the company to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on water-treatment facilities and pension benefits in coming years, he said.

The company will also seek court approval to pay employees and continue health-care and other benefits, according to the statement.

Patriot has 13 active mining complexes in Appalachia and the Illinois Basin and controls an estimated 1.9 billion tons of coal reserves, according to its website. It sells thermal coal to electricity generators and metallurgical coal to steel and coke producers.

Wilmington Trust Co., and U.S. Bank NA were among Patriot’s largest unsecured creditors, according to court papers. Wilmington is a trustee to $250 million in notes and U.S. Bank is a trustee to $200 million in notes. The filing listed BlackRock Inc. (BLK), State Street Corp. (STT) and Vanguard Group Inc. as entities that control 5 percent or more of the voting stock in the company.”

The Report continues:

“U.S. coal use in the first quarter was the lowest for that period since 1988, according to the Energy Information Administration. Utilities have switched some power plants to cheaper natural gas as regulations restricting emissions make coal costlier to burn. Gas fell to a decade low in April amid a surplus of the fuel.

This year, Patriot has reduced thermal coal production by more than 4 million tons, trimmed costs and laid off 1,000 employees or contractors, according to a May 9 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.”

In a companion report on energy Forbes reported that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has filed a petition against the bank in the context of an investigation into the alleged manipulation of energy markets in California and the Midwest. The Forbes report states:

“A petition filed Monday at a federal court in Washington DC revealed that FERC is conducting an investigation into JPMorgan’s “abusive” bidding strategies in energy markets, possibly inflating prices by more than $73 million.

FERC has served JPMorgan with at least two subpoenas since April, as the bank headed by Jamie Dimon has refused to hand over at least 25 emails with potentially sensitive information. The regulator is now asking the court to force the bank to hand those over, while investigating the potential violation of JPMorgan’s “duty to make truthful and non-misleading communications to the Commission and regional energy market operators.”

The regulator is accusing JPMorgan of using at least four “abusive” bidding strategies that have helped it extract “exaggerated” payments from wholesale markets in the Midwest and California. Complaints coming from the California Independent System Operation (CAISO) and the Midwest Independent Transmission Operator (MISO) sparked an investigation into how JPMorgan was potentially gaming the system to its own benefit.”

Obama’s energy policy is a fraud at best. He is pandering to his radical left-wing environmental base. Every time the cost of energy increases it’s tantamount to a tax. Not only does the cost of you electricity go up but so does the costs for food stuffs, goods, and services you purchase that are dependent upon electricity. Supermarkets need electricity to refrigerate their perishable items. Hospitals need electricity to run all of their diagnostic equipment and monitors. In a recent heat wave on the east coast people had no air conditioning causing the deaths of babies and seniors.

Obama’s obsession with green energy, while placating his radical base, is killing the American people. It is causing rising prices and losses in jobs. How is this hope and change working out for you?

The Green Energy Agenda

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.” — James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10, November 22, 1787.

When the New Constitution was being debated by members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 three leading advocates for the adoption of a new constitution based on a federal form of government based on republican principles were James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. To advance their arguments they published a series of essays, 85 in all, under the name of Publius. These Federalist Papers are used today, especially by the federal courts, to understand the intent of the framers of our Constitution. One of the most important of these Federalist Papers was Number 10 written by James Madison, considered by many to be one of the leading framers of our Constitution, decrying the dangers of factions that were existent in the Articles of Confederations.

In Federalist No. 10 Madison addresses the inherent dangers of “Factions.” He considered factions as a danger to a federalist form of republican government as they would be the basis of a tyranny of either the majority or minority depending how strong these factions were. In Federalist 10 Madison said:

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished, as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation, the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they are in some degree true. It will be found, indeed, on a candid review of our situation, that some of the distresses under which we labor have been erroneously charged on the operation of our governments; but it will be found, at the same time, that other causes will not alone account for many of our heaviest misfortunes; and, particularly, for that prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements and alarm for private rights which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other. These must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administration.”

…….

“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well as speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities that where no substantial occasion presents itself the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.”

To mitigate the effects of factions of a federal republic Madison advocated a bicameral legislature where the lower house (House of Representatives) was more responsive to local and factional issues while the upper house (Senate) would be more responsive to the inserts of the various states and national as a whole. This why the members of the lower house were elected by direct popular vote in their various districts and served for a two-year term while members of the upper house were chosen by state legislatures, conventions or governors and serve for a six-year term. Members of the Senate could be recalled by their states. This changed when the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1913. Now Senators are elected by direct popular vote in their respective states.

The Seventeenth Amendment states:

“The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each state, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each state shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislatures.

When vacancies happen in the representation of any state in the Senate, the executive authority of such state shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, that the legislature of any state may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.”

Critics of the Seventeenth Amendment claim that by altering the way senators are elected, the states lost any representation they had in the federal government and that this led to the gradual "slide into ignominy" of state legislatures, as well as an overextension of federal power and the rise of special interest groups (factions) to fill the power vacuum previously occupied by state legislatures. In addition, concerns have been raised about the power of governors to appoint temporary replacements to fill vacant senate seats, both in terms of how this provision should be interpreted and whether it should be permitted at all. Accordingly, noted public figures have expressed a desire to reform or even repeal the Seventeenth Amendment. The following states did not ratify the Seventeenth Amendment. It should be noted that Utah (explicitly rejected amendment). Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia did not ratify the Seventeenth Amendment due to the above stated reason.

You might consider that if we did not have the Seventeenth Amendment the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) might not have passed the Senate. Two borderline Senators were Mary Landau of Louisiana and Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Both Senators were from states with Republican dominated legislatures with Republican governors opposed to the PPACA.

Today we are living in a nation controlled by factions. These factions, unlike in Madison’s day, are promulgated from the offices of lawyers, lobbyists, and political activists groups in Washington, D.C. with offices located on “K” Street. Some of the most influential and well financed of these factional groups are the environmentalists, pharmaceutical firms, manufactures, agribusiness, communications, and public service unions. These factions have brought us ObamaCare, Cable TV monopolies, the Environmental Protection Agency, Ethanol, and financial institutions to name a few. They supply the money and political muscle to elect politicians that will advance their cause to the detriment of the nation.

One of the most powerful of these groups is the environmentalist. Over the past 40 years, since the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970, these groups have morphed from conservationists concerned with conserving our natural resources to radical left-wing groups bent on pushing an agenda that is more red than green. They have been able to ban DDT causing the deaths of millions of African children to the effects of Malaria and Dengue fever due to the inability to kill mosquitos, their primary carrier. They have destroyed the coal industry. They have even dictated the light bulbs you can use in your home.

One of the most egregious of their radical agenda is the “Green Energy” movement. We have all heard of scandalous boondoggles of Solyndra and their $500 billion dollar bankrupted solar panel facility. But how many of you have heard of the Ivanpah Solar Panel Facility and their $1.6 billion government investment from the Department of Energy or the brewing scandal over government financed wind farms?

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System will consist of three separate solar thermal power plants in south-eastern California. The facility will consist of fields of heliostat mirrors focusing sunlight on receivers located on centralized solar power towers. The receivers will generate steam to drive specially adapted steam turbines. For the first plant, the largest ever fully solar-powered steam turbine-generator set was ordered, using a 123 MW Siemens SST-900 dual-casing reheat turbine. Final approval was gained in October 2010. On October 27, 2010, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, and other dignitaries gathered in the Mojave Desert to officially break ground on the project.[2] The first phase of the Ivanpah facility is scheduled to be finished in 2013.[8] The project has generated controversy because of BrightSource's decision to build it on ecologically intact desert habitat. Project construction was temporarily halted in the spring of 2011 due to the impacts on desert tortoises, although construction resumed.

The project will occupy about 4,000 acres near Interstate 15 near the California–Nevada border, north of Ivanpah, California, and will be visible from the adjacent Mojave National Preserve, Mesquite Wilderness, and Stateline Wilderness.

The project has received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. The total cost of the project is about $2,180 million. BrightSource has contracts to sell about two-thirds of the power generated at Ivanpah to PG&E, and the rest to SCE.

The largest investor in the project is NRG Energy, a generating company based in Princeton, N.J., that has put in $300 million. The project has also received an investment of $168 million from Google, but in November 2011, Google announced that they would no longer invest in CSP due to the rapid price decline of photovoltaics, and stopped its research on the project.

While solar generated energy may be a very good thing — in fact I have solar panels on my roof — I should be left up to the private sector and utilities to make the investment as they have done coal-fired and natural gas generating plants. Why should the people in Arkansas or Nebraska contribute to federal dollars to guarantee loans for the generation of expensive and perhaps unreliable electricity for California and Nevada? This is really no different that the people of California and Nevada putting their as tax monies into a highway trust fund that finances the building of bike trails in Virginia or Delaware. If the states of California and Nevada want to invest in solar power the people of those states should have a say in the matter.

Wind Farms are another brewing scandal. You may have heard about the controversial Cape Wind project, the country’s first planned offshore wind farm off of the coast of Massachusetts. There are a lot of interests involved — fishermen, environmentalists, residents, aviation, the wind lobby, etcetera — and while the project has been digging around for some federal funding for some time, they did recently get at least the full permitting go-ahead from the Obama administration.

Opponents of the project, however, claim to have evidence that the Obama administration applied undue political “pressure” to the Federal Aviation Administration to get the project green-lighted. Their complaints have garnered the notice of Rep. Cliff Stearns, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee of Solyndra-crackdown fame. Fox News reports:

“The emails that came from the FAA that I have seen obviously shows the White House is pushing the FAA for political reasons,” said Rep. Cliff Stearns, R-Florida.

Audra Parker, the president of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, an organization that’s working to prevent the wind farm’s development, said her organization has obtained documents she believes are proof the Federal Aviation Administration fast-tracked the project despite safety concerns for local aviation.

A PowerPoint presentation given in 2010 states: “The Secretary of the Interior has approved this project. The Administration is under pressure to promote green energy production. It would be very difficult politically to refuse approval of this project.”

“I think the Cape Wind project is something similar to Solyndra in the sense there’s a lot of pressure from the White House,” the congressman said.

The Fox report continues:

“The White House dismissed Stearns' latest accusations. And Cape Wind spokesman Mark Rodgers said that despite the concerns raised by opponents, the project has been heavily vetted.

"Cape Wind has been through the most comprehensive review of any power facility in the history of the Northeast U.S., and so if we're on any kind of fast track I'd hate to see the slow track," said Rodgers.

In fact, the FAA is again reviewing the project after a federal appeals court overturned the agency's ruling that 130 proposed turbines posed "no hazard" to aviation. Rodgers believes the FAA will once more rule in Cape Wind's favor despite political pressure from opponents.

"We know in the early years there was a lot of political pressure by project opponents to try to prevent the FAA from ever approving Cape Wind. But despite that negative political pressure the FAA has approved this three times after reviewing the full record -- twice during the Bush years, once now in the Obama years, and we're confident when they have this one more decision to make that we'll be approved again," Rodgers said.

Despite the latest efforts to fight the project, Cape Wind hopes to begin building next year. But they are facing multiple lawsuits and the possibility of further delays as both sides -- for and against the development -- charge that politics is playing a role in the battle.”

If you have ever driven across the country, especially in the Mohave Desert near Palm Springs, California you will see thousands of electric-generating wind farms with many of the wind mill blades not turning. In fact Palm Springs generates much of its electrical power from these wind farms. They stand like silent sentinels to a new age of environmentalism. Most of them were built by private investors who revived tax breaks for the construction. They were considered a capital investment — like any other investment in capital equipment and allowed accelerated depreciation. This is fine as the money was put up by investors that have since bailed out after their depreciation allowance ended and they became a maintenance burden with a negative return on the original investment and were sold to utilities and cities such a Palm Springs.

A few years ago T. Bone Pickens touted the advantages of wind farms across the central plains of Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado – the “Wind Belt” where once duct storms raved the landscape. Since then Pickens has bailed out of the wind farm technology for energy generation due to the lack of capital investment and the problems in obtaining rights of way for the construction of hundreds of miles of power lines. Pickens has now thrown his financial resources behind natural gas

On July 8, 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that T. Boone Pickens has postponed plans to build his Texas wind farm. He said the project was stopped partly because existing transmission line capacity wasn't available. His company had planned to build new lines, but couldn't get financing. On the same date, The New York Times, reported that Pickens is committed to purchasing 667 wind turbines and will develop wind projects for them. On his Mesa Power Group website, Pickens said he expected to continue development of the Pampa project, but not at the pace originally expected.

On December 15, 2010, Nathanael Baker, in an article for www.theenergycollective.com, wrote that Pickens has scrapped plans for wind farms and will instead focus exclusively on natural gas. According to the article, on December 10, 2010, MSNBC reported that "Pickens said low natural gas prices have made utility companies view wind power as too expensive." There are thousands of miles of existing natural gas pipelines across the nation and it is less expensive to build new ones than wind farms and their needed transmission lines. Also natural gas pipelines are underground and do clutter the landscape with thousands of giant windmills. Natural gas is also a clean, plentiful, and cheap fuel to fire electrical generating plants. The environmentalists should love this, but for some reason they do not.

I often bemoan the federal government’s green-energy agenda, not because I take any umbrage with the idea of non-conventional sources of energy, but because the federal government should not be in the business of choosing what those new forms of energy are going to be. The free market is perfectly capable of coming up with viable, affordable, efficient substitutes on its own, thank you very much (think about it — the car was initially an alternative to the horse, you know, and cars are a heck of a lot more environmentally friendly than horses).

The government is not a dispassionate bystander, but rather an entity with both political ambitions and ‘unlimited’ cash at its disposal — it’s too risky that they’ll just waste our money while aiding and abetting a form of energy that doesn’t hold real promise, or isn’t ready for mass production. Which, as we’ve seen with the Obama administration, they frequently do.

What’s worse, going full-on big-government to accomplish your political green agenda only sets up an environment for rent-seeking and crony capitalism, messing with market signals and leading to lord only knows what kinds of corruption. Given that the pro-wind movement has a notoriously powerful lobby, I wouldn’t say no to Rep. Stearns’ suggestion of a federal investigation.