On An Interview With James L. Buckley

Posted: 8/10/2014

Trigger

The wall street journal published an interview with him on 8/2/2014, see here.

Takeaways

Selected excerpts and comments (emphasis added):

1. “He [Buckley] has kept busy in retirement, thinking and writing about the dangers of an ever-expanding federal government. He notes that at the beginning of the New Deal, the U.S. Code, the entire body of federal statutory law, took up a single volume. "At the end of the New Deal, there were three volumes. When I served in the Senate, there were 11 volumes. . . . The one that is called a 2012 edition—they're still printing the volumes—is going to be about 33 or 34 volumes."
   [This is what I call Democracy In Crisis! Too much power centralization; too much control.]
2. “"There are now 235 volumes of regulations that occupy . . . 17 feet of shelf space of six-point or seven-point type." Even unintentional violations can bring criminal penalties, "so that you can now find yourself in jail for violating a statute you would never have any reason to know existed."”
   [This is obviously a form of madness! We urgently need a complete moratorium on any new legislation and regulation in Washington, DC! Every law and regulation on the book should be scrutinized by the U.S. Congress and repealed rather than maintained!]
3. “He [Buckley] attributes a great deal of mischief to Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, the 1937 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the Social Security Act's unemployment-compensation scheme, which is federally designed and funded but administered by the states. The justices adopted a broad interpretation of Congress's power to spend money under the Constitution's General Welfare Clause—"in a manner that utterly subverts what was left of the 10th Amendment," in Mr. Buckley's view.
   The court held that Congress could condition federal funding on states' enactment of laws that met with Washington's approval. These grants-in-aid programs have multiplied. "They started blossoming with Lyndon Johnson," Mr. Buckley says. "There may have been 100, 120 of them at that time. By 1970 there were about 300, with an annual expenditure of $24 billion. There are now over 1,100 of them, with a federal expenditure this current fiscal year [of] $647 billion. So it is now the third-largest category of spending," after entitlements and defense.”
   [Yes, the centralization of power in Washington, DC lastest beginning with the New Deal, but I would even trace it as far back as to the American Civil War,  has radically perverted the U.S. Constitution.
   The other perversion is, of course, the willingness of so many individual states to comply with this unconstitutional regimen and to give up so much sovereignty to the federal government for money!]