The Constitution is a document of specific, enumerated, and therefore limited federal powers that has, unfortunately, been stretched over the years to accommodate an ever larger and more intrusive federal government. Chief Justice John Roberts recently struck another blow against limited government by creating a new, unrestrained power to use taxes to compel activity (even if the proponents of the tax insist vehemently that it is not a tax!).
President Obama no doubt rejoiced, not just because his health care law would stand, but because he has long seen the Constitution’s limits on federal power as a problem to be overcome.
As Obama himself explained in a 2001 radio interview when he was a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School: “The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in the society and to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution.”
