The Enumerated Powers

I would like to take a minute here to try to set the record straight. I don’t recall exactly when he said it, but I have heard the President of the United States of America, a man who is supposedly a Constitutional Lawyer by trade, speak against the Bill of Rights. The Anointed One, our Beloved Leader Barrack Hussein Obama (may peace be upon Him) has said that the Bill of Rights is flawed because the rights listed are, in his words, “negative rights.” He says that the Bill of Rights only list things that the government is not allowed to do but don’t say anything about what the government is required to do. He, like most liberals, (OOPS, we aren’t supposed to call them liberals any more, they are Progressives), He doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that the founding fathers wrote the Constitution in such a way as to severely limit the power of the Federal Government. Do they not teach that at Harvard Law School? I’m the son of a cotton farmer from Arkansas and I understand that principle. That is the way this country has been governed since the ratification of the Constitution. And that form of government, or lack thereof, is what has made this country GREAT!

Give me a second here to catch my breath and step down off of my soapbox. Talk amongst yourselves for a minute. Okay. Back to the topic at hand.

I am not an expert on the Constitution, but I can read it and understand it. Our Constitution was not written in some high-handed legalese that only a Philadelphia Lawyer could understand. (Speaking of Philadelphia, Go Phillys, beat them Yankees.) I think that Thomas Jefferson wrote in such plain language for a reason. When the language of a law or constitution or any such document that regulates the way we govern or do business is simple, then nothing can be hidden in the document. Compare our Constitution which you can get in a book small enough to carry around in your shirt pocket of the Senate’s Healthcare Proposal. This new monster bill is more than 2500 pages long. Plus, no one except the lawyers that wrote it could understand anything it says.

But back to the Constitution, while what The Anointed One, our Beloved Leader Barrack Hussein Obama (may peace be upon Him), said about the Bill of Rights is true, it’s not 100% true of the Constitution. Yes, the Bill of Rights tells what the Federal Government can NOT do to you, there is a list of things in the Constitution that the Government is supposed to do.

This list of responsibilities or powers is call “The Enumerated Powers.” They make up Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. Article I Section 8 clearly lists the duties of the Federal Government. There are 18 things that Congress is supposed to do. How we’ve gotten to this place where people think that the Government is supposed to take care of them, make sure they have health care, a place to live and food to eat will take someone with much more education than me and much more time to do research. I can tell you this, it didn’t start on January 20, 2009. We have been headed in this direction for decades, not just years and we may never get our full freedom back again. We have given up much of our freedom in exchange for security. That path can only lead to the total destruction of our country, and total loss of our freedom. I don’t know if we can turn this around, but before we can attempt to go back we first have to stop.