Waterways, Street signage, Obamacare

Dear Federal Gov’t, Who Do You Think You Are?

- Warner Todd Huston
Friday, May 6, 2011

One of the main forces behind the Tea Party movement and the disgust that many Americans have with the federal government is its supreme arrogance and its constant unwanted and unwarranted power grabs. This is one of the things that the American people really need to put their attention toward reversing.

Perhaps it is just beginning?

Alaska, for instance, has just thrown its weight behind the opposition to the federal government’s obscene persecution of an Alaskan citizen who was arrested for violating rules that the federal government has imposed on those Alaskan waterways flowing through national parks.

The state is claiming that regardless of what the man did on the waterways, the federal government has no authority to arrest and prosecute the man because the waterways are in Alaska’s purview and the feds are over stepping.

Another recent example is in the millions of dollars that the federal government is forcing local city and state governments to spend on new street signs. The feds have changed its regulations on the typography on street signs and is requiring all street signs in the country to conform to the new regulations. From whence does this arrogance come? Well if states get federal highway money the feds feel they have the right to demand that the states spend that money the way the feds say they must spend it. If that means wasting millions on new street signs then that’s just what they will expect to be done.

Then there’s the multiple states joining the lawsuit over Obamacare. At least 20 states attorney generals have joined together to fight off President Obama’s attempt to take over the country’s healthcare system.

The federal government’s grasping for unconstitutional power is everywhere these days from the EPA, to the president, to Congress making rules without really bothering to justify them under our governing document.

All might not be lost, though. There is a growing movement among the various states to begin to reapply their 10th Amendment rights.

The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.â€