With all due respect to mom & pop, if the good citizens of the State of Alaska were making sure that their children were being taught the federal government’s constitutionally limited powers as the Founding States had intended for those powers to be understood, then Alaskans would not only be able to argue the following against EPA regulations, but the regulations of many other federal agencies as well.
While it can be argued that environmental protection regulations are a good thing, the major constitutional problem with the EPA is the following imo. The states have never expressly constitutional delegated to the feds the specific power to regulate environmental issues.
In fact, using wide language, a previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting justices had clarified that powers that the states have not constitutionally delegated to the feds 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.
Note that even if the states had constitutionally delegated environmental protection powers to the feds, it remains that the Founding States had expected the elected members of Congress, not non-elected federal bureaucrats like those running the EPA, to take full responsibility for how those powers are used, including respecting citizen dissatisfaction with federal regulations. This is evidenced by the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, evidently a good place to hide those clauses from Congress (sarc).
However, corrupt, post-17th Amendment ratification, career lawmakers have been establishing many constitutionally undefined federal agencies, presumably so that non-elected bureaucrats can do all the dirty regulatory work that lawmakers probably want to do, such regulatory work based on state powers in many cases that Congress is letting these agencies get away with stealing from the states.
In other words, Congress is wrongly front-ending itself with regulatory agencies probably so that corrupt lawmakers can keep their voting records clean. And by keep their records clean, lawmakers can fool low-information citizens, citizens who have probably never been taught the fed’s constitutional limited powers, into reelecting them.
Patriots need to work with Trump to drain the unconstitutionally big federal swamp and lose these unconstitutional federal agencies.
Excellent post. I’m going to steal some of that for a letter to my senators. I hope that winning the WH, plus control of House & Senate doesn’t cause people to back off of an Article V Convention of the States. The only way to stop federal nonsense like this is to make language much clearer about what the feds can & can’t do. We have GOT to get the Feral Gov’t under control.