Rick Perry’s Tenth Commandment

.....Lots of conservatives have been in fights over public displays of the Ten Commandments, but Governor Perry is more interested in the Tenth Amendment: “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.” Reestablishing the sovereignty of the states — and rescuing the language of states’ rights from its segregationist connotations — is a pretty good job for a high-profile governor.

Speaking of presidents: Rick Perry has a complicated relationship with the Bushes, which is to say that he’s hesitant to criticize them and they hate his guts. W. stayed well away from Perry’s gubernatorial-primary melee against Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose oatmeal-mushy Republicanism has a distinctly Bushian savor to it. But the mark of W. was all over the campaign against Perry. Former president George H. W. Bush endorsed Senator Hutchison, an unusual step for the habitually reserved retiree, who usually stays well removed from the dirty business of vote-grubbing, surveying the groundlings from the heights of his eminence. Bush père was joined in his support by former vice president Dick Cheney, who offered an endorsement and called Hutchison “the real deal.” Hutchison was further fortified by the Bush clan’s in-house Machiavelli, former secretary of state James Baker, who led the Florida recount fight in 2000 and remains their go-to fixer. W. mouthpiece Karen Hughes came out of the political woodwork to support the insurgency, along with W.’s secretary of education Margaret Spellings. Karl Rove advised Team Hutchison. The gang was all there: All this in a primary challenge to unseat an incumbent Republican governor with one of the most conservative — and most successful — records to be found: Que paso, Bushes?

Part of that was payback. Perry, generally circumlocutious on the subject of W., gave himself a little time off the leash during the 2008 Republican presidential primaries. Often caricatured as yet another snake-handling southern social conservative, Governor Perry backed thrice-married dress-wearing pro-choice lapsed Catholic Rudy Giuliani, on the theory that Rudy would be a badass commander-in-chief abroad and a reliable constitutionalist at home. Politics being politics, the Texan and the New Yorker met up in Iowa, where more than a few Hawkeye conservatives were already getting restive about out-of-control federal spending on the Republicans’ watch. Governor Perry let loose the observation that “George” — and the Bushies hate it when Perry calls him “George” in public — “has never been a fiscal conservative.” Never? “Wasn’t when he was in Texas . . . ’95, ’97, ’99, George Bush was spending money.” He also criticized Bush as being limp on immigration.

The truth hurts, but there’s more to the Bush-Perry friction than that. One longtime observer of Lone Star politics described the Bushes’ disdain of Perry as “visceral,” and it is not too terribly hard to see why. The guy that NPR executives and the New York Times and your average Subaru-driving Whole Foods shopper were afraid George W. Bush was? Rick Perry is that guy. George W. Bush was Midland by way of Kennebunkport. Rick Perry’s people are cotton farmers from Paint Creek, a West Texas town so tiny and remote that my Texan traveling-salesman father looked at me skeptically and suggested I had the name wrong when I asked him whether he knew where it was. (Governor Perry confesses that one of the politiciany things he’s done in office is insisting that the Texas highway atlas include Paint Creek, making him the hometown boy who literally put the town on the map.) Bush is a Yalie, Perry is an Aggie. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and Perry was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, flying C-130s in the Middle East. Bush has a gentleman’s ranch, Perry has the red meat. The irony is that Perry, a tea-party favorite, personifies the hawkish new fiscal conservatism that has allowed the GOP to find its way out from under George W. Bush’s shadow, but he himself remains in the shade of that politically poisonous penumbra......More

“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.”

The 10th amendment is completely worthless. All it does is say what happens to powers NOT delegated to the national government. But that's not the problem.

The problem is WHAT powers ARE delegated. The 10th does absolutely nothing to clarify or limit what falls into that category. It remains a question for the national branches to determine for themselves, with the judiciary getting the last word.

10th amendment arguments therefore become nullification arguments. The truth is, the states gave up true sovereignty when they ratified the Constitution. They became mere agencies of the national government. Or as James Madison put it:

Conceiving that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcileable with their aggregate sovereignty; and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable, I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful."
Letter to G. Washington, April 16 1787

10th Amemdment: “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.”

“...........Perry vs. the Bushes, Perry vs. Washington, Perry vs. the Establishment: That’s potent stuff for racking up votes in Waco and Amarillo, and the conservative suburbs of Dallas and Houston. But it’s not just Perry’s politics — it’s his policy, too.

Here’s something you won’t hear an up-and-down-the-line conservative like Perry saying all that often: “If you don’t like medical marijuana and gay marriage, don’t move to California.” Don’t move to California is a major theme of Texas’s economic-development program, and in fact Californians are moving to Texas at a pretty good clip, as economist Arthur Laffer documented in his report “Rich States, Poor States” (see “Going Alamo,” National Review, July 20, 2009). Perry is content for Californians to let their freak flags fly, though he confesses that he recoils from some of the implications of his hard-line constitutionalism: The thought of flag-burning, for instance, makes Rick Perry one angry Eagle Scout. But his laissez-faire attitude is surprisingly broad, something he has in common with another distinguished governor, Sarah Palin, whose libertarian streak on questions like marijuana use is an underappreciated component of her political character. “Don’t make me accept it as normal,” Perry says, “and do not make me pay for it. But that’s classic Tenth Amendment, and I’ll fight to the death for California’s right to decide for themselves how they want to live.” And then he adds with an earnest, butter-wouldn’t-melt smile: “You want high taxes and an onerous regulatory climate, that’s your choice.” As he says this, he swivels around excitedly in his desk chair, the cuffs of his trousers hiking up to reveal a pair of cowboy boots emblazoned “Liberty” and “Freedom.”

Perry loves federalism in principle, because it is a critical part of his understanding of the well-balanced American constitutional order — and also because he’s confident that if it comes down to competition among the states, Texas is going to come out on top. He has a firebrand’s style but a traditional conservative’s skepticism of ideology. Asked to describe his governing philosophy, he chuckles, “Don’t spend all the money.” Like most governors, he is not particularly interested in ideological purism or abstract intellectual consistency. He’s a free-market guy, to be sure, but he also likes to brag about the state’s Enterprise Fund and Emerging Technology Fund, which it uses to bribe (my word) businesses to set up shop. Yes, practically every state and city in the country has an “economic development” program like that, and they’re all kind of distasteful to hardcore free-enterprise ideologues, but Texas gets more for its money than do most states, including a rate of job growth that is phenomenal compared with the rest of the big states’..............................”

But the real Rick Perry bears little resemblance to the character in the story.

I think the following tidbit from the article is spot on about Perry...

.....“Rick doesn’t want to run for president,” says one longtime ally. “Rick wants to be asked to run for president. He wants to be drafted.” The main obstacle to a Perry campaign, he says, is Perry’s acute political intelligence, which may be telling him he won’t win. “It’s a hard hill to climb for a governor of Texas.” And it’s one that Perry may have made unnecessarily steep for himself......

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