DGS49
Diamond Member
Citing federal cuts, Pitt and CMU pull out of hosting science conference
The universities said the decision was directly related to federal cuts to research funding.
www.post-gazette.com
Our "newspapers" and other news sources are flooded these days with stories of events, benefits, services, and wonders that either will or might not happen because of President Trump's campaign to...what would you say?...take a chainsaw to Federal government spending. The linked article is just one of thousands like it.
It is interesting to me that none of the stories mentions the proverbial "elephant in the room," that beast being the uniform unconstitutionality of all the stuff that is being deleted from the Federal cornucopia of goodies.
The Constitutional matter is not complicated, and should be familiar to anyone who remained awake in their high school Civics class. A bit of truncated history might be illuminating in this regard.
When the Articles of Confederation had been deemed a failure and our Founders got together to write a new constitution, there was a fundamental principle that they agreed on. The 13 "states" (former colonies) wanted to retain their individual sovereignty to the greatest extent possible, while ceding certain powers to a central government where it made sense to do so. So the central government took over, for example, the obligation of raising and funding an army and navy, establishing currency, establishing and maintaining the post office (and post roads), handling patents and copyrights, and so on - the tasks that made sense for the common government, while leaving "everything else" to the individual States.
The essence of this compromise can be found in two places: Section 8 of Article I (a listing of Congress' powers), and the Tenth Amendment (the formal declaration that all the other powers were retained by the States).
So to this day, the States have control over real estate law, commercial law*, estates and trusts, criminal law, civil law, and so on. The powers of the Federal government are LIMITED, which your Civics teacher undoubtedly repeated on many occasions.
But politicians are both predictable and evil, and starting in the 1930's the U.S. Congress has slowly eroded these principles, getting involved in a giant pile of matters that, technically, they have no "power" to get involved in. Today, we look at EDUCATION as a main point of contention, but the broad issue also involves healthcare, housing, feeding the poor, saving the planet, and so on. In fact, most of the discretionary spending that Congress does comes OUTSIDE its powers under Article I, and is thus unconstitutional.
A good illustration of the early machinations dealing with this conundrum is the creation of Social Security. Congress has no power to create or fund a compulsory national retirement program. In effect, the Democrats in Congress made a deal with the newly-Left-Wing Supreme Court. Rather than funding SS benefits with "tax" dollars, they created a fictitious "trust fund" that was kept solvent with "payroll taxes" (FICA), and the retirement benefits were taken from this trust fund - an arrangement that remains the case until this very day. Indeed, if the SS trust fund runs dry, Congress CANNOT make up the difference with "tax" dollars, and SS would have to go on a pay-as-you-go basis, paying benefits out of current FICA contributions.
Getting back to the point, virtually all of the program cuts that DOGE is raising today are reductions or elimination of programs that are unconstitutional. Nothing that is done by the Department of Education is authorized by Article I...not the student grants and loans, not the special lunch and other programs, none of it. And most of what it is doing will not be eliminated, merely shifted to other Federal Departments. For example, the college student grants and loans will probably be administered by the Department or Revenue. Enforcement of anti-discrimination laws will revert to DoJ. And so on.
I want to know when they will get around to TSA, an agency that apparently spends more of their taxpayer-funded effort at internal union work than they do screening passengers.
So as you read these heart-rending articles about all the free stuff and goodies that DOGE is threatening to take away, keep in mind that all of it is unconstitutional anyway, so no harm done(?).
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* U.S. commercial law is an interesting case. It would have been a chaotic situation if every single state had its own code of commercial laws, but Congress had no power to pass commercial legislation. National companies would have had a nightmare of complying with 50 different sets of State laws. So the states GOT TOGETHER, believe it or not, and agreed on a comprehensive set of laws, and all of them individually passed those laws - the same in every State. It's called the Uniform Commercial Code.
