Exclusive: Tea Party Would Cut $9 Trillion

“Ha, I scoff at you.
That doesn’t happen at the federal level?...surely?...never?”

It has been a commonplace in the states and a rarity with the feds. I can’t say it has NEVER happened but the feds are much better insulated from bribery and undue influence of economic actors.

It is much easier for a big corporation to get its way with states as my example showed. Any knowledge of American history reveals this over and over.

The ninth amendment says nothing of the sort.

“The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be contrued to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This was designed to counter the argument that the Bill of Rights by enumerating certain rights denied others. (Madison and Hamilton initially opposed the BoR specifically because opponents to the constitution would claim exactly that.)

All the Founders, even Jefferson, did not deny that there were implicit and unspecified powers which were inseparable from those specified. The Constitutional Convention expressly reject a clause which would have restricted the the fedgov to those powers explicitly specified.

The best analysis of this is in Hamilton’s essay on the constitutionality of the Nation Bank. It is one of the most brilliant papers he ever wrote and he understood the constitution better than anyone as the author of 2/3s of the Federalist. This was the most significant political writing ever produced in the Western hemisphere.

The reason the CC was called was to restrict the powers of state governments and expand that of the “general” government.

So what would you or would you not discontinue, af?

Aren’t there already DOD agents involved? Do we need both Departments, with their Directors and administrative staff, building overhead, redundancy?

The DOE has certain responsibilities when it comes to nuclear weapons, the DOD has certain responsibilities when it comes to nuclear weapons. It was decided by Truman and then Eisenhower that nuclear weapons, and the processes involved with nuclear weapons, should at certain points remain under civilian control, and every President since then has agreed with those decisions.

I agree that there are parts of the DOE that we could do with out. No arguments there. As for specifics about the nuclear program, I'm not going to venture there, mostly because I don't think it's appropriate to discuss certain things in a public forum from a security perspective, but also things may have changed since I left the service.

There is some redundancy, no doubt about that. Hell, there's plenty of redundancy between the individual services in general.

A big problem is that we have far too many defense contractors that are going to fight tooth and nail to preserve that redundancy because they financially benefit from it, and they've done a good job of buying off Congress. You have to crack that nut if you want to make any headway anywhere.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.