Posted on 01/04/2015 11:52:21 AM PST by Olog-hai
The delegates to the Con-Con had discussed Dr. Ben Franklin’s suggestion to grant Congress the power to build canals to support commerce, watercourses being one of the best ways to move manufactured goods since ancient times. In other words, federal canals would have been the precursor to Eisenhower’s interstate highway system.
The problem is that the delegates to the Con-Con ended up rejecting Dr. Franklin’s suggestion. In fact, when the 14th Congress passed a bill to establish national roads and canals, President James Madison, previously a delegate to the Con-Con, vetoed the bill, Madison undoubtedly very much aware that the delegates to the Con-Con had rejected the idea when drafting Congress’s Article I, Section 8-limited powers.
Veto of federal public works bill
And with all due respect the family and supporters of the late President Eisenhower, constitutionally clueless Eisenhower should have learned in West Point that in order for the feds to tax and spend to build an interstate highway system, he first needed to lead Congress to successfully propose a highway amendment to the Constitution to the states.
In fact, regardless that federal Democrats and RINOs will argue that if the Constitution doesn’t say that they cannot do something then they can do it, the Supreme Court has officially condemned that foolish idea. More specifically, the Supreme Court has clarified that powers not expressly delegated to the feds via the Constitution, the power to establish a national highway system in this case, are prohibited to the feds.
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
However, regardless that the Founding States had rejected the idea of supporting commerce with national transportation system, the Founding States had also made the Constitution amendable so that a later generation of states could amend the Constitution to grant the feds such a power. But this is where problems with the ill-conceived 17th Amendment come into play.
Although I think that the interstate freeway system is a great idea, it remains that it was wrongly established outside the framework of the Constitution. But I suspect that if state lawmakers still uniquely controlled the Senate when the House made the highway appropriations bill, that Constitution-respecting senators who likewise thought that an interstate highway system is a good idea would have blocked the House highway bill until after Congress successfully proposed a constitutional highway amendment to the states for ratification.
But arguably as a consequence of 17A, federal senators were possibly as clueless to the constitutionally required consent of the Constitution’s Article V state majority for the feds to tax and spend for an intrastate highway bill as the voters who elected them were, low-information senators unthinkingly passing the bill with no constitutional authority to do so.
DC and obozo need to recover the TARP monies they gave to their cronies because a new tax on fuel, revenue neutral or not as Korker stated this morning, is not going to cut it.
With cheaper gas per gallons, more driving will occur.
The tax is per gallon, so much more revenue is entering the system for the same tax per gallon.
This isn’t justified.
If we've got the money to import and then support millions of "unaccompanied" illegal aliens, there is no "enormous shortfall". Thune is a liar.
cause and effect; taxing anything always slows the consumption. Hell, pretty soon we won’t need infrastructure because nobody will be able to afford vehicles or fuel.
” It is already mandated for 2015 cars and after. “
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but do you have a link? I do remember EDRs (black boxes) being required for all cars in about this timefreame, although 98% of new cars already had them, even by a few years ago.
Here we are on Free Republic, two weeks after the passage of a TRILLION DOLLAR BUDGET BILL, the contents of which nobody yet knows.
And the voices sing out from our midst: Raise taxes! Raise taxes! Raise taxes!
Astonishing to me. Depressing, infuriating.
Hat’s off to you for at least responding rationally, which I could not have done.
I haven’t read the article; just the excerpt.
I saw Thune on Fox News Sunday today and he clarified they were considering gas tax hikes over a two year period, but would also be cutting other taxes to create an offset.
I still disagree with the gas tax hike.
Many of the roads built after the country was established were toll roads, but they were not privately owned. The construction of the National Road, for example, which followed a route roughly marked today by US-40 from Cumberland, Maryland out to Indiana, was authorized by Congress in the very early 1800s as part of the agreement for Ohio's entry into the Union. That was originally a toll road, but the tolls were collected under state charters in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
There are currently 68 responses to this thread. The source is the AP which should send warning signs up among all Freepers. Second, Senator Thune said on the same program cited by the AP that he would consider this proposal only if it were revenue neutral. In other words, some other tax would need to be cut in order to fund this tax measure.
The advantages:
It’s a regressive tax, those who use the roads pay to repair and build new ones.
The taxes that get cut are currently being used in some entitlement program to line the pockets of Democrat voters.
This forum has become overrun by people who don’t read the articles, don’t check the source or check the validity of the claim, and just want to rant. This article is Democrat propaganda and everyone has bought it hook, line, and sinker.
Sure, they can pass along the cost of fuel to the consumer. But if the fuel is too expensive then the industry will lose a lot of business as consumers either buy less or use alternative modes of transportation.
Except building mass transit costs far more than it should to build, takes years longer than necessary to build, fails to take in customer needs, is poorly and expensively managed once it is built, costs too much to ride, and is typically empty. If mass transit is needed and wanted, then let private enterprise build it.
You just can’t fix stupid can you?
all options must be looked at
How about cutting unnecessary spending? Is THAT on the table for the Republican establishment? I doubt it.
Without an effective transportation system (be it roads, canals or both) in the interior of the U.S., the country basically would have faced one of two future scenarios:
1. The U.S. would not have grown much larger than the original thirteen states. More specifically, the U.S. probably would never have expanded west beyond the Appalachian Mountains -- leaving the entire Mississippi River watershed open for settlement and development by the British and/or the French.
2. The U.S. would have grown beyond the Appalachians, but would have functioned as a "nation" in name only, with population centers along the Eastern seaboard operating in an environment where it was cheaper to trade with foreign trading partners thousands of miles away than with the interior of the U.S.
The second scenario played out in the U.S. for the first 10-15 years after the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It became clear very quickly that this scenario was untenable, and the specific issue of transportation costs for settlers living on the Appalachian frontier was one of the underlying issues of the Whiskey Rebellion in the early 1790s.
The first scenario never would have worked for obvious reasons, and I'm sure even an ardent Federalist like James Madison eventually figured this out. If Madison truly believed that individual states should build and maintain their own transportation systems, then the War of 1812 almost certainly exposed the weakness of that scenario to him. As the U.S. Secretary of State under Thomas Jefferson, Madison was probably more directly involved in the Louisiana Purchase than anyone in the U.S. government. Surely he would see the folly of purchasing 800,000+ square miles of North America from France without any plan for connecting it to the rest of the young nation.
There are several reasons why mass transit (and by this I mean fixed-rail transit, not a bus system) costs so much to build. For one thing, most mass transit systems are constructed in urban areas -- which means there is almost always a long and costly property acquisition process involved. Secondly, any transportation project that uses Federal funding requires a lengthy (and again, costly) environmental review process.
P.S. Those same factors make highway projects in those urban areas extremely expensive, too.
If mass transit is needed and wanted, then let private enterprise build it.
Sure, that would work. But to be fair (and consistent) we'd have to do the same with all public roads, too -- right?
FU John Thune!
I assume that you are basing your remark on what the AP said that John Thune said, rather than what John Thune actually said. Dangerous ground.
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