The “Pledge to America” recently unveiled by House Republicans is more Republican gobbledygook. Republican promises to cut waste, fraud, abuse, and earmarks, and institute reform, change, privatization, and accountability are always so vague, misleading, and exception-ridden that they are – without exception – absolutely worthless.

Republicans are such hypocrites that even while they preach smaller and less intrusive government they pass legislation to increase the size and scope of government.

On the very day (September 23) that the House Republicans issued their worthless “Pledge to America,” they also voted in overwhelming numbers along with Democrats to pass four pieces of legislation that violate the very Pledge that Republicans maintain they will adhere to as a majority in the House.

Plan 4 in the Republican Pledge is the promise to “to reform Congress and restore trust.” Under the paragraph titled “Adhere To the Constitution,” there appears this statement:

For too long, Congress has ignored the proper limits imposed by the Constitution on the federal government. Further, it has too often drafted unclear and muddled laws, leaving to an unelected judiciary the power to interpret what the law means and by what authority the law stands. This lack of respect for the clear Constitutional limits and authorities has allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year. We will require each bill moving through Congress to include a clause citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified.

This is absolutely correct. However, what the Republicans forget to mention is that it is Republicans who controlled the U.S. House of Representatives during the last six years of Clinton’s presidency and the first six years of Bush’s presidency. Republicans are the ones who have ignored the proper limits imposed by the Constitution on the federal government. Republicans are the ones who have drafted unclear and muddled laws. Republicans are the ones who have shown a lack of respect for clear Constitutional limits and authorities. Republicans are the ones who have allowed Congress to create ineffective and costly programs that add to the massive deficit year after year.

Here are the four pieces of legislation that an overwhelming majority of House Republicans voted to pass on the same day they published their Pledge:

• The Family Health Care Accessibility Act
• The Emergency Medic Transition Act
• The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Reauthorization Act
• The Training and Research for Autism Improvements Nationwide Act

I wonder what clauses would be included with these bills citing the specific constitutional authority upon which they are justified?

The Family Health Care Accessibility Act of 2010 (H.R. 1745) amends the Public Health Service Act “to deem volunteer practitioners at health centers as employees of the Public Health Service for purposes of any civil action that may arise due to providing services to patients at such health centers.” This bill was introduced in the House by a Republican, Timothy Murphy of Pennsylvania. It passed by a vote of 417 to 1. The lone no vote was the heroic Ron Paul (R-TX). One hundred and seventy Republicans voted for the bill. But since the Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to have anything to do with health care, this bill lacks specific constitutional authority and would have to be rejected under the Republican Pledge.

The Emergency Medic Transition Act of 2010 (H.R. 3199) amends the Public Health Service Act “to direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to award grants to state entities with jurisdiction over emergency medical personnel to provide for the expedited training and licensing, as emergency medical technicians, of veterans who received training as such a technician while serving in the Armed Forces.” Only five Republicans voted against this bill. But since the Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to have anything to do with health care, this bill lacks specific constitutional authority and would have to be rejected under the Republican Pledge.

The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Reauthorization Act of 2010 (H.R. 5710) amends and reauthorizes the controlled substance monitoring program of the Public Health Service Act to “foster the establishment of State-administered controlled substance monitoring systems.” This bill comes with a price tag of $15 million for fiscal year 2011 and $10 million each year for fiscal years 2012 and 2013. It requires the states receiving a federal grant under this Act to submit “aggregate data and other information” to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and to “facilitate prescriber use of the State’s controlled substance monitoring system” and “educate prescribers on the benefits of the system both to them and society.” This bill was introduced in the House by a Republican, Ed Whitfield of Kentucky. It passed by a vote of 384–32. The Republican vote was 140–31. But since the Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to even designate a controlled substance, this bill lacks specific constitutional authority and would have to be rejected under the Republican Pledge.

The Training and Research for Autism Improvements Nationwide Act of 2010 (H.R. 5756), also known as the TRAIN ACT of 2010, has an official title that concisely sums up its purpose:

To amend subtitle D of title I of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act of 2000 to provide grants and technical assistance to University Centers for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities Education, Research, and Service to improve services rendered to children and adults on the autism spectrum, and their families, and for other purposes.

In awarding grants under this legislation, the Secretary of Health and Human Services must give priority to applicants that are “(1) minority institutions that have demonstrated capacity to meet the requirements of this Act and provide services to individuals with autism and their families; or (2) located in a state with one or more underserved populations.” The vote on this bill was 393–24. The Republican vote was 167–24. But since the Constitution doesn’t authorize the federal government to do anything about autism or any other medical condition, this bill lacks specific constitutional authority and would have to be rejected under the Republican Pledge.

The only reason Republicans ever look good is when they are out of power and oppose the Democrats on major pieces of legislation like Obamacare, extending unemployment benefits, increasing HUD appropriations, etc. When all of their actions – not their just plans, promises, and pledges – are compared to even an imperfect standard like the Constitution it is apparent that there is not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties.

Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] writes from Pensacola, FL. He is the author of Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State and The Revolution that Wasn’t. His newest book is Rethinking the Good War. Visit his website.

Copyright © 2010 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

One of the stupidest attacks on advocates of the Tenth Amendment that I’ve recently seen was written by Brian Hicks and published in The (Charleston) Post and Courier on March 20. According to Hicks, South Carolina state legislators who are paying undue attention to the Tenth Amendment are “a bunch of guys obsessed with nineteenth century history” but “haven’t learned much from it.”

“The last time they got uppity and began mouthing off about states’ rights, we got our butts kicked.” Hicks goes on to explain that states’ rights really mean for most of its proponents the “race issue.”

And even before that became the case, according to one history professor at the College of Charleston, the term “has a tragic history in the life of our state. It harks pretty clearly to the nullification controversy. It began with the unsuccessful attempt of South Carolinian to resist the high tariff signed into laws by Andrew Jackson in 1832 and ended in disaster. The controversy dragged on for a couple of years, egged on by John C. Calhoun, until the state finally backed down.” But “resident busybodies didn’t shut up and kept fanning the flames until finally they just decided to secede. And we all know how that turned out.”

Yes, we all know how that turned out. Since the defeat of the secessionist South in 1865, the feds have been in charge of the military means of making any defiant state government compliant with its orders.

Therefore, it was only a matter of time before we reached our current condition, in which the states became only submissive tools for carrying out the will of a centralized federal administration (which in fact has no constitutional standing except as an indeterminate extension of executive power).

This, by the way, has nothing to do with defending the institution of slavery, which we are certainly well rid off. It’s about a growing federal bureaucratic dictatorship, which neither of our two publicly financed national parties is willing to touch.

For Hicks’s information, James Madison, one of the authors of the Constitution, defended the doctrine of nullification, most famously in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. The notion that state governments could “interpose” themselves between an odious federal law, as were the bloated tariffs of 1828 and 1832, and the citizens of their states has a pedigree going back to the late eighteenth century.

The authors of the Tenth Amendment clearly believed in the right of nullification, and if Jackson put down the resistance to it mounted by the residents of the seaport of Charleston, he did so by threatening military force. He was not making a constitutional argument of any kind.

There is one point on which Hicks may be correct, namely that South Carolina Republicans who are unhappy about usurpations of power under Barack Obama did not seem to care when “the last administration was stripping away all our constitutional rights with the Patriot Act.”

But there are two obvious responses to this partly justified charge. One, for many decades all kinds of supposed defenders of states’ rights have invoked this principle quite selectively. If New Deal-Great Society Democrats discovered the Tenth Amendment when they were opposing the racial integration of public and private institutions in Southern states, the putative allies of Mr. Hicks are at least as hypocritical when they scream states’ rights in order to allow gay marriage and the legal use of marijuana.

How can Hicks be so blind to the fact that it is liberal Democrats who are out in front in the hypocritical appeal to states’ rights on behalf of their socially liberal agenda?

Two, it is simply untrue that those who favor a new emphasis on the Tenth Amendment are all fans of the Bush administration and its liberal internationalist foreign policy. Certainly this judgment would not apply to Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin or the millions of followers of these recent presidential candidates.

The Constitution Party, the Campaign for Liberty and other groups that are part of the Tenth Amendment movement are overwhelmingly composed of critics of the Bush administration. While there may be GOP politicians who have climbed on board, most of the Republican supporters I’ve met do not strike me as stand-ins for Karl Rove and John McCain.

Moreover, it is possible that some Republican legislators did vote for the Patriot Act because they were genuinely concerned about national security after 9/11. This vote does not mean these legislators also favored a further extension of the federal administration into such domestic matters as social policy and taxation.

On the other side, however, are the assorted hypocrites in Hicks’ camp, who complain about federal surveillance in dealing with terrorism but who adore federal snooping to uncover “discriminatory” business practices and “gender-discrimination,” or to regulate the flow and direction of tobacco smoke.

Why is having the ATF or another part of the federal government control our smoking or hiring habits any less of a federal interference than the Patriot Act? The answer is of course self-evident. All forms of federal interference that serve the ideological ends of people like Mr. Hicks are perfectly acceptable.

Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and a Guggenheim recipient. He is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and a contributor to Taki’s Magazine, LewRockwell.com and many other websites.  He is the author of eight books, with his most recent being Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007)