Reasserting Federalism in Defense of Liberty
Ken Cuccinelli
Attorney General of Virginia
1. “No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” George Mason
2. "We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have an overreaching central government—a government that seeks to plan and control virtually every aspect of our lives and our economy,…
3. Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. … the idea of federalism reemerge. People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds.
4. I am not aware of a time in history when this many states have sued the federal government to rein in its power: Today, more than half are parties to lawsuits against the new health care act and its individual health insurance mandate.
5. Our first legal argument is that the government’s attempt to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to mandate the purchase of a private product—in this case, health insurance—goes beyond Congress’s power.
6. …when the colonists were boycotting British goods while demanding that King George III and Parliament repeal the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts…. [the king’s] own lawyer—the solicitor general—told Parliament that the boycott was legal under British law. In other words, the colonists could not be forced to buy British goods.
7. The federal government has argued in court that not buying health insurance is as much of an economic activity as buying it, and therefore that it can regulate a citizen’s decision not to buy government-approved health insurance under the Commerce Clause. Nonactivity is the same as activity…
8. [T]he EPA is another front in Virginia’s federalism fight. In December 2009, the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants dangerous to public health because they are alleged to cause global warming. This finding gave the agency the immense power to regulate CO2 emissions…
9. For the ruling, the EPA relied primarily on data from a United Nations global warming report. Emails leaked in 2009 in the Climategate scandal showed … climatologists manipulated data to overstate the effects …. Since the revelations from the leaked emails became public, some scientists involved in the report have had to back off some of their positions and research. Renowned climate researcher Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a long-time proponent of the global warming theory, admitted recently that there is no question that data in the U.N. report was misleading, and that “it is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data” that would work against the theory of rapid global warming in the last century.
10. …my office petitioned the EPA to reopen its hearings on greenhouse gases and review new evidence. Instead it ignored our request—in fact, it ignored the law.
11. …the EPA’s own models show that over the next 90 years these regulations would only reduce temperature increases by less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit.
12. …costs to every American household are projected to increase by $3,000 a year…add about $950 to the price of each new vehicle…cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars…serious consequences of decisions made by unelected bureaucrats.
13…with the federal government’s attempt to assume the power to command us to buy its chosen health insurance, we face some of the most significant and unprecedented erosions of liberty in our lifetimes. And federalism—that tension between state sovereigns and the federal government—was designed for the very purpose of helping to preserve that liberty….the failure of conservative principles has not been due to the principles themselves, but to the failure to fight for them.
14. Success in this fight for federalism is critical, for as Ronald Reagan warned us:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
________________________________________
https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2011&month=04
Ken Cuccinelli
Attorney General of Virginia
1. “No free government, nor the blessings of liberty, can be preserved . . . but by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” George Mason
2. "We have asked government to do more for us, and all the government asks for in return is a little bit more of our liberty. Over the decades, we kept asking. And because the courts and the politicians were all too happy to oblige, regardless of what the Constitution said, we no longer have a federal government of limited powers. We have an overreaching central government—a government that seeks to plan and control virtually every aspect of our lives and our economy,…
3. Thankfully, though, in the last several years, people have woken up and are pushing back. … the idea of federalism reemerge. People want to return to a government of limited, enumerated powers, and an arrangement in which states serve as a check when the federal government oversteps its constitutional bounds.
4. I am not aware of a time in history when this many states have sued the federal government to rein in its power: Today, more than half are parties to lawsuits against the new health care act and its individual health insurance mandate.
5. Our first legal argument is that the government’s attempt to use the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to mandate the purchase of a private product—in this case, health insurance—goes beyond Congress’s power.
6. …when the colonists were boycotting British goods while demanding that King George III and Parliament repeal the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts…. [the king’s] own lawyer—the solicitor general—told Parliament that the boycott was legal under British law. In other words, the colonists could not be forced to buy British goods.
7. The federal government has argued in court that not buying health insurance is as much of an economic activity as buying it, and therefore that it can regulate a citizen’s decision not to buy government-approved health insurance under the Commerce Clause. Nonactivity is the same as activity…
8. [T]he EPA is another front in Virginia’s federalism fight. In December 2009, the EPA declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are pollutants dangerous to public health because they are alleged to cause global warming. This finding gave the agency the immense power to regulate CO2 emissions…
9. For the ruling, the EPA relied primarily on data from a United Nations global warming report. Emails leaked in 2009 in the Climategate scandal showed … climatologists manipulated data to overstate the effects …. Since the revelations from the leaked emails became public, some scientists involved in the report have had to back off some of their positions and research. Renowned climate researcher Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, a long-time proponent of the global warming theory, admitted recently that there is no question that data in the U.N. report was misleading, and that “it is obvious that there has been deletion of adverse data” that would work against the theory of rapid global warming in the last century.
10. …my office petitioned the EPA to reopen its hearings on greenhouse gases and review new evidence. Instead it ignored our request—in fact, it ignored the law.
11. …the EPA’s own models show that over the next 90 years these regulations would only reduce temperature increases by less than 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit.
12. …costs to every American household are projected to increase by $3,000 a year…add about $950 to the price of each new vehicle…cost businesses hundreds of millions of dollars…serious consequences of decisions made by unelected bureaucrats.
13…with the federal government’s attempt to assume the power to command us to buy its chosen health insurance, we face some of the most significant and unprecedented erosions of liberty in our lifetimes. And federalism—that tension between state sovereigns and the federal government—was designed for the very purpose of helping to preserve that liberty….the failure of conservative principles has not been due to the principles themselves, but to the failure to fight for them.
14. Success in this fight for federalism is critical, for as Ronald Reagan warned us:
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We did not pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
________________________________________
https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2011&month=04
