Thursday, May 3, 2012

This Is What The Commerce Clause Is All About

When the Commerce Clause was written, this is the type of thing our Founding Fathers worried about. A single state, or states, that would work together to halt, tax, impede, limit the economic activities of another state.

This is an important distinction from Wickard. Wickard held that a farmer, whose sole purpose was to feed his own livestock, was in violation of a farm bill that regulated the output of farmers who engaged in interstate commerce. If you haven't read Wickard, you should. It is the Plessy v. Ferguson of progressive court judgements. Coming up with "separate but equal" is one of those phrases that should be on a list of terrible Court judgements, including the phrase "emanations and penumbras." If the Plessy court had held that equal was equal, back in 1896 (done from memory, if I'm wrong, fuggadaboudit) most of what has had transpired in the intervening years to Brown wouldn't have been necessary.

When Judge Bork was denied his tenure on the Court, the battle over who or who wasn't admissible to the Court finally gained the attention of the People. The Court, as the Third Branch simply had been ignored in most of what passes for political debate in this country. The Court wasn't political. Until the time of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we had an almost Grecian faith in our Courts. There is a reason why we built so many monuments in the Classic Grecian style. Reason before emotion. Strict examination of the pure meaning of what words mean. No ambiguity. No equivocation.

So, here's the video. This video should remind the more intelligent of the Left that there is value in accepting rules of governance. The problem with radical agendas is, the last man on the top of the pile gets to determine the rules of governance. Not really what the last man killed had hoped for, but Revolutions have a way of making monkeys out of men.


There is a way of explaining how all these people are wrong, but it requires real world experience in things like trains and coal.

Most of us have never held a chunk of coal in our hands. (I have.) Most of us can't do math. (I can.)

A mile long train, traveling at 30 miles per hour, will take how long to pass by a fixed point? Do you need any help? It is true, that under certain circumstances, minutes will make the difference in saving someone's life. Inarguable. If that is the greater value, why not build an overpass for the train crossing?

Because, it's silly.

Silly arguments aren't argued. Which is why there's not argument against what you viewed in the video above. The arguments above are so silly, so vapid, so merit less, that to respond to the arguments is to give credence that which isn't warranted.

Any child should be able to find the continual errors in argumentation. That the ideas expressed are strongly expressed is true. The speakers really believe the words coming out of their mouths are important. 

1 comment:

MAX Redline said...

That was a huge stretch of the Commerce Clause, and one of the poorer verdicts in our history.