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Originally Posted by JohnnyD
Sadly, this applies to most elected officials though... |
I agree with the gist of your comment with the caveat that most officials may have read the Constitution, but may not have understood it. Not that it is hard to understand, but that they have accepted its current distortion.
The picture, though telling of current congressional ignorance of the Constitution, is obviously political in that it's Bachman's face rather than a group picture of Congress, the POTUS, and the SCOTUS. She may have made a gaff or two about the Constitution, but she seems to have a deeper understanding of it and its original intent than most. One supposed gaff was her questioning of Geithner wanting to know where in the Constitution he and the Federal Reserve had the power to act as they had the past two years. He said that the power was granted by Congress. Sounds reasonable? This was supposed, by her critics, to show her ignorance of the Constitution. Actually, nowhere in the Constitution is Congress allowed to delegate its powers to autonomous, unaccountable, independant agencies. This also applies to the myriad of independant regulatory agencies created by Congress--EPA, FDA, etc.. They are units of government having self-contained legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Little agencies of tyranny with no accountability. Congress can,
blamelessy, have unpopular legislation and regulation passed by these agencies. The Constitution gives Congress specified powers of legislation and regulation for which it will be responsible and answer to at election time. It does not give Congress the power to bypass that responsibility by delegating it to another unelected agency which is not accountable to the people.