Tea Party and the Constitution

The Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive think tank, has released Setting the Record Straight: The Tea Party and the Constitutional Powers of the Federal Government, In this paper, Elizabeth Wydra and David Gans argue against the tea party movement's claim that our country’s Founders established a sharply limited national government. (Some of this material appeared in a Huffington Post article, cited here.)

This Issue Brief documents first that the Founders established the federal government to act whenever the states were “separately incompetent” and granted the federal government broad power to, among other things, regulate interstate commerce and tax and spend to promote the general welfare. To be sure, our Constitution established a national government of enumerated and not unlimited powers, as affirmed by the Tenth Amendment and recognized by the Supreme Court in cases such as United States v. Lopez. But while these powers are enumerated, they are also broad and substantial.

Second, we chronicle how most constitutional amendments ratified by “We the People” in the last two centuries have expanded the enumerated powers of the federal government, building on the already robust powers granted to Congress in the 1789 text of the Constitution. These amendments gave vast powers to the federal government to protect equality, civil rights, and voting rights and to raise funds through taxes on income.