One of the biggest complaints of leftists today is how hard it is to enact their agenda because the Constitution keeps getting in their way. They could turn America into Utopia if only they could repeal the Second Amendment, severely curtail the First Amendment, get rid of the Electoral College and turn the Supreme Court into a partisan political branch under one-party control. This is precisely why the Founders created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: to restrain the power and reach of a strong centralized government. They had just defeated a tyrant, and they knew human nature well enough to know that that threat never goes away.

All Americans should thank God every day for the Constitution. That thin piece of parchment acts as a powerful shield protecting your rights and freedoms from people who want to plow them under and build a new socialist version of America on top of their graves.

If you think I’m exaggerating, a recent Real Clear Politics poll found that a third of today’s Democrat voters think Americans have “too much freedom,” a phrase I can’t even comprehend.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/real_clear_opinion_research/poll_is_censorship_a_partisan_issue_149790.html

The Founders wisely made it very difficult to amend the Constitution, a process that requires overwhelming approval. So the left takes aim at it in two main ways: Either by ignoring it completely or by appointing judges and Supreme Court Justices who misinterpret it though their rulings. They justify this by claiming the Constitution is a “living document.” But if it doesn’t mean what it says but whatever any random judge feels that it should say, then it means nothing.

For a long time, we didn’t hear much about the Tenth Amendment. Liberal judges had ignored it so completely that many courts, politicians and bureaucrats acted as if it had been repealed. But it’s still right there in the Bill of Rights, and I’m glad to see that conservative Justices have recently been restoring its force.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states that powers not specifically granted to the federal government belong to the states. There was intense debate during the Constitutional Convention and the ratification process about which limited powers should be with the federal government and which should remain with the states. They didn’t leave that open to interpretation, but it’s been “interpreted” to death anyway as proponents of big government have forged ahead slowly, and sometimes rapidly, to usurp as much power as possible in areas where it has no business being. Here is just one of endless examples of how ignoring the Tenth Amendment “for a good cause” leads to the unconstitutional expansion of federal power:

The federal government decided to get involved in public school cafeterias with the passage of the heart-touchingly-titled “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.”

This federal power grab started seemingly innocently. The bill provided school lunches (later growing to include breakfasts) to poor students (later growing to include all students.) How could anyone object to healthy, non-hungry children? Well, it might have had noble intentions, and filled a real need, but schools are supposed to be the province of state and local governments. Still, feeding hungry children is so important that we can make an exception to the 10^th Amendment, just this ONE time (as if state and local leaders didn’t care if their own children went hungry.)  

Liberals love a bill like this because it gives them the chance to expand federal power while milking it for political gain and posturing about how much more they care about, say, hungry children than their flint-hearted opponents who care only about the Constitution. But we must remember that the government lives by the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” As soon as schools began taking that federal school lunch money, they learned it was like being a fish that swallowed the bait on a hook.

From that little seed, federal control of schools began growing like wild weeds. Soon, Washington was using the leverage of school lunch funds to impose more and more federal mandates, from dictating school curriculums to forcing boys into girls’ bathrooms. They don’t belong there any more than DC bureaucrats belong in your local classrooms. This is how making exceptions to the 10^th Amendment for “one urgent/important/good cause” has led to federal government interference in every aspect of our lives.

This is also why campaigners for parents’ rights should be just as concerned about restoring the 10^th Amendment as they are about voting out their leftwing activist school boards.

You can buy my book here: The Three Cs That Made America Great: Christianity, Capitalism and the Constitution - Mike Huckabee