“I also suspect that those who wrote the Constitution anticipated that it would be left in the care of those as honourable as themselves–I think they’d be terribly disappointed by their successors.”

Amen to that.

Back in the seventies when Jimmie Carter imposed a national “gas saving” 55 MPH speed limit, it was by demanding that the states pass such laws or risk losing their Federal highway funds. That it was a clear, if indirect, violation of the Fourth Amendment didn’t matter, nor did it matter that the funds being withheld had been taxed away from the citizens of the very states being strong-armed by the tactic.

This procedure was used again to compel states to pass mandatory seat-belt laws, is being used at present for the No Child Left Behind fiasco, and I suspect it’s going to used to impose this RealID idiocy on us. and those are just the high-profile circumstances of which I’m aware.

This is a form of economic extortion that clearly violates the intent of the Constitution, if not quite the letter of it. It’s a scheme that takes advantage of a Constitutional loop-hole–one that I suspect exists because the people who wrote the Constitution never imagined that the government they were creating would ever become–ever be allowed to become–so huge and overbearing. I also suspect that those who wrote the Constitution anticipated that it would be left in the care of those as honourable as themselves–I think they’d be terribly disappointed by their successors.

-jcr