The Congressional Budget Office has been in the news recently for reporting higher costs for some proposed legislation than Democrat supporters of those proposed laws have claimed.  Essentially, the CBO’s charter is to go through a proposed bill in order to analyze its costs and the effects of that spending on the budget and national debt.  Douglass Elmendorf, the current director of the CBO, has come under harsh fire from supporters of health care legislation for his more critical financial analyses than those put forth by the statist propagandists Democrats who seek to take over the US health care system.

This new CCO is a great idea for an ambitious politician to seize right now, perhaps a conservative firebrand like Michele Bachmann.

The Congressional Constitution Office would be a mandatory part of the legislative process.  All legislation that made it through the House or Senate would require an addendum from the CCO analyzing exactly where the US Constitution grants the legislative branch of government the power to pass the particular legislation (please see the 10^th amendment).  Rule changes stipulating that bills must be constrained to one similar topic would be required to make this work, for example no social program spending can be combined with a military appropriations bill, and would provide the side benefit of making the legislative sausage-making process more transparent.

The second part of the CCO would be its requirement to be completely transparent.  The CCO website would be required to show a graphical representation of the amount of money spent by government and the purported constitutional provisions involved.  Clearly this would consistently show that they use two basic approaches: the flawed “General Welfare” argument and their overreaching (and illegitimate) interpretation of the commerce clause.

If you look at the following breakdown of the 2009 budget from Wikipedia you can see that they break the spending numbers out into many agencies:

In order to get my arms around the truth of the spending versus the constitutional authority I decided to break the spending items out into three groups.  The first group consists of powers that are delegated to the legislative branch by Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.  The second group are exercises of power that can only be justified by a dishonest interpretation of the General Welfare clause, and the third group are spending items that can only be justified by relying on the Interstate Commerce clause.  As a constitutionalist, I argue that only those items in the first group are legitimate, constitutional exercises of legislative branch power.

Article 1, Section 8:

Interest on National Debt (8.5%)

Department of Defense (16.85%)

Global War On Terror (4.75%)

US Dept of Veterans’ Affairs (1.46%)

Homeland Security (1.23%)

Dept of Justice (.66%)

NASA (.58%)

Dept of Treasury (.41%)

Judicial Branch (.21%)

Legislative Branch (.15%)

Executive Office of the President (.01%)

Total: 34.81%

General Welfare:

Social Security (21.05%)

Medicare (13.34%)

Medicaid and SCHIP (7.32%),

Unemployment, welfare, other mandatory spending? (11.77%)

Health and Human Services (2.3%)

US Dept of Education (1.93%)

HUD (1.26%)

Social Security Administration (.27%)

EPA (.28%)

National Science Foundation (.23%)

Corps of Engineers (.15%)

Other Agencies (.24%)

Other Off-Budget Discretionary Spending (1.27%)

Total: 61.41%

Interstate Commerce:

Energy (.82%)

Dept of Agriculture (.68%)

Transportation (.38%)

Interior (.35%)

Labor (.34%)

Small Business Administration (.02%)

Total: 2.59%

Interestingly, though my intent with this post was simply to propose this new agency, my own analysis of the budget breakdown illustrated some interesting points.

The dishonest statist’s best friend: the General Welfare Clause

When arguing with people on the Left, I have often made the statement that at least two-thirds of the federal budget is extra-constitutional, meaning that the legislative branch has no constitutional authority to legislate in those areas.  After breaking up the budget data into these three groups I can see that my previous gut feeling about that was not far off – by my count over 60 percent of the federal budget is justified with egregiously dishonest references to the General Welfare clause.  Note that the Left’s position on that clause is completely contradictory to the very clear 10^th amendment.  For example, CNS News asked Nancy Pelosi where the Constitution grants her the power to force Americans to purchase health insurance.  Her classic statist response was “Are you serious?”.

Interestingly, it is not hard to find a response to that General Welfare clause dishonesty from the founding fathers themselves, who presciently predicted that we would have charlatan politicians like Obama and Pelosi and Reid.  The man considered to be the father of the US Constitution, James Madison, specifically addressed this:

With respect to the words “general welfare,” I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.

 – James Madison

Interstate Commerce Clause

Though most observers are familiar with the argument that the Interstate Commerce clause is abused by the legislative branch to control things that it has no authority to control, it was interesting to find that (based upon my breakdown) they do not use that clause to justify spending as much as they use it to justify legislation that controls the states and usurps the states’ 10^th amendment protections.  FDR, no friend of the Constitution, managed to get the Supreme Court to overturn 150 years of precedent in the horrible Wickard v. Filburn decision, which held that Congress could regulate intrastate commerce  under the guise of interstate commerce.

When you think about it, it’s amazing how many of today’s problems in America were instigated by that statist jerk Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  I’d like to walk my dog around his grave until nature called.

While my proposed Congressional Constitution Office would not solve all of our problems it would clearly illuminate the perennial constitutional dishonesty that is par for the course for the United States Congress.  Obviously it will never pass because it takes away their power, but during an election year it could be used by savvy conservatives to show the contrast between conservatives and the socialists that now own the Democrat party.

Though he dropped it as soon as he was elected, didn’t candidate Obama espouse transparency in government?