The True State of the Union

Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution declares that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient…" George Washington established the tradition of an annual message starting with his first in 1790. Since then, all presidents have presented annually either a written or an oral message to fulfill the constitutional requirement. President Bush, of course, followed this tradition on January 28, 2003. Governor Gary Locke of Washington state presented a Democratic Party rebuttal.

There were too many issues covered in these speeches to address in detail in one column, but there was a common thread running through all of the discussion: government has the solution. Apart from talk of Iraq and terrorism, the president's speech was largely a laundry list of billions of dollars that he wants to spend on research, education, foreign aid and the like. The Democrats want to spend even more billions, but their response still followed the theme that bigger government can solve our problems.

The true state of our Union is that we are living with a plethora of problems caused largely by government action. Those problems are not going to be solved by more federal action, but by Americans acting privately or at a state or local government level after confining the federal government to its constitutionally defined role.

Our vulnerability to terrorist attack is the result of interventionist foreign policies, and the lax control of our borders. Now that our incessant meddling in the affairs of nations the world over has built the terrorist threat to its present critical state, I agree that we have to destroy the terrorist groups and overthrow the governments that support them. At the same time, we need to get our government's nose out of the affairs of other nations. Our military can be better used to patrol our own borders and coasts than to enforce UN mandates in other areas of the world.

Economic recessions are caused by a complex interaction of spending and saving decisions by individuals and businesses, mob psychology, and misguided government efforts to control it all. Nothing that we can do will stop the business cycle, but we can make the swings wider and less predictable through government involvement. Money supply manipulation, incentives or disincentives for this or that, and other government action are like the desperate steering of an inexperienced driver out of control on an icy road. They can only make the situation worse.

The president and Democrats agree that we need tax cuts to fight the recession. We do need tax cuts; and lower taxes will improve the health of the economy at every stage of the business cycle. But the valid reason for lower taxes is that our current level of taxation is unfair, and supports government actions not authorized by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants to Congress certain enumerated powers which the Framers considered necessary to have a stable federal system. There are only about 18 such powers, and they are the only powers which Congress can legally exercise. Nowhere among that list is there any mention of aid to or control of education, supporting the charitable activities of "faith-based" organizations (dare we say "churches"?), providing health care for American citizens (much less those of other nations), determining what technologies people will use for transportation, or any of a million other things in which government meddles today.

Apart from the allowed purposes of spending, the Constitution in the Bill of Rights specifically prohibits certain actions that are dangerous to liberty. Part of the same trend of growing government is to compromise these protections in the name of national security. All three branches of government have been steadily working to loosen the bonds of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth and other amendments. If we allow this to continue, the final state of the Union will be a nation few of us would want to live in.

In ignoring the constitutional limitations of federal powers, our Union long ago embarked on a course toward total government. The state of the Union is that we are still on that course, and proceeding at an accelerating pace. The "necessary and expedient" response is for the president and Congress to reverse that course and respect the law as laid out in the Constitution.