Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcgcombi | Hacker News Reader

And of course, USAFacts' interpretation of the responsibilities of government are right out of the liberal progressive manifesto... but I think that is the way the data need to be reported, because there is no Constitutional anchor-point for 2/3rds of what the US Federal Gov't actually does.

View on HN

Can you explain the obsession people have with the Constitution? It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution.

The Constitution limits the Federal government. One can therefore say that government programs that are outside the scope stated by the Constitution are outside the legitimate scope of the Federal government.

The Tenth Amendment is pretty clear: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Now, I know, the Supreme Court has effectively gutted the Tenth Amendment, but the intent was that the Federal government was restricted to a specific set of activities, rather than allowed to do everything everyone thought was a good idea.

So if you think that the intent matters, then you see much of what the Federal government does as being a power grab of things that it never should have had the power to do - and which it still does not have the legitimate authority to do.

Beyond the intent, the plain meaning of the text is clear. If the power is not explicitly enumerated as belonging to the federal government, it is reserved to the states. At most, this would allow the federal government to implement a policy based on a non-enumerated power, which state legislatures could then override. Only powers explicitly enumerated would be binding across the Union.

Telecommunication has really changed the way the world works with respect to all of this, and made us care much more about the federal government than the state governments that are, on paper, supposed to be much more powerful.

Without kind-of ignoring the limitations of the constitution, we'd likely have had an Articles of Confederation style crisis at some point, and had to replace (or heavily amend) the Constitution since then. Which would be better than kind-of ignoring it from our perspective, though not from that of the people who had to live through said crisis.

As it is, we de facto ignore the parts that would screw up operating a modern nation-state, the "must preserve the independence of states!" wing gets to not-vote for amendments that de jure reduce said independence in order to let things actually work well/sanely, and no-one has to live through a crisis bad enough to get that wing to abandon their position. So... win/win if you're happy with a local maximum, I guess?

The U.S. Constitution and its amendments establishes limits to the power of the Federal Government. The obsession with it is that governments tends to overstep their bounds. It's something the lay person can read and point to, and definitively say when the government is doing something it is not authorized to do.

I'm pretty sure that many people have had conflicting ideas about what the government is "definitively" allowed to do or not do, which is what things like the courts and the legislature are for - to decide those things, and ratify clarifications and changes if needed. "Constitutional Law" is not an easy thing for a lay person to interpret.

I think there's a pretty good analogy to be made between legislation and software. The Constitution is the "operating system" of the US government, and the laws are "applications" that run on that OS. If an application attempts to do something not permitted by the OS, it should be an error.

So, the system is full of users, each of whom want different features to be supported by the OS. And some features are needed to protect subsets of the users, while other users not so much. What seems to be happening is, some of the users don't want certain features implemented. In order to stop these features, they are claiming that the OS design specifically forbids these features.

But the OS is software. And the users collectively pay the contractors who write the software, and they can change it to say anything they want it to say, because the users are paying for it, and using it. Unlike religion, the design is not literally written in stone. The designers were well educated on the history of OS design, and knew that designs change over time. So their design allows for modifications without a total rewrite - something they saw as a feature.

So it seems to me the arguments and proclamations made by some users that "It's not in the design!!!" are equivalent to those made by, say, systemd opponents. There's a lot of people (myself included) that do not want systemd in their OS. But if all the other users vote and want systemd in the OS, I will capitulate and learn to deal with it.

We shouldn't get so caught up in the damn kernel or OS that we stop improving the whole system.

It's all fun and games until you're forced to download Security Patch NSA.2017

Changing the OS is fine, but there's only one way to do it: via constitutional amendment. Merely wanting it to say something different is not sufficient. The users have to follow the official enhancement process.

What I originally was trying to get at is how the Constitution has almost nothing to do with most of what the federal government actually does. It sets the boundaries of civil liberties, policy and procedure, federal authority, the separation of federal powers, and the differences between states and the federal government.

The Constitution is not an OS, or even a kernel - it is an access control policy. What the government actually does is implement that ACL. So when people invoke the constitution all the time, it's like saying "They're trying to download 10 gigabytes of data, but the ACLs!!!!!", when the ACLs don't have anything to do with disk quota. So this is my point: people keep bringing up the Constitution when it does not apply.

"Can you explain the obsession people have with the Constitution?"

It's the foundational document of the most powerful, prosperous nation in the history of the species. Things like that attract allegiance. It would be strange if it didn't.

"It seems like some people believe all new laws shouldn't exist if they're not in the Constitution."

Your "some people" straw man is likely fictional, or at least very rare. Laws that conflict with the constitution can be struct down via Judicial Review. Otherwise new laws are entirely compatible with the constitution. The US and its various states have no difficulty producing reams of new laws that survive the constitution just fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com