Trump’s being attacked with the charge that he made U.S.-funded aid to Ukraine contingent on a political quid pro quo. A big debate has ensued and an impeachment ruckus.
It all takes for granted that foreign aid to Ukraine or any foreign state is allowable under the U.S. constitution. But such aid is not constitutional, definitely not.
One could be more radical in one’s critique of our government and say that any U.S. spending of any sort is not only unconstitutional, it is, to put it more accurately, illegitimate since taxes are illegitimate and the U.S. government is illegitimate. Attempting to justify foreign aid spending is no different than attempting to justify any tax and spend program of any Congress. None of it is legitimate under the view that taxes are theft. And that view has strong arguments going for it.
Still, there is some educational merit in raising the somewhat less radical question of whether or not, if the constitution is regarded as a legal guide, some particular avenue of spending is allowable under that document. This is not the same as asking what the Supreme Court says or rules. That Court endorses all sorts of things as constitutional that are not. Examining the specious arguments of that body is another separate game or exercise in uncovering erroneous argumentation not to be followed out here.
All that context in place, it can be said unequivocally that Congress doesn’t have the enumerated power to enact a foreign aid program. It doesn’t even have the power to enact a domestic aid program. For example, President Grover Cleveland “vetoed a bill to provide drought relief to farmers in the West owing to his belief that such assistance was not the province of national government.”
Just because our generations have overruled that which was apparent to Cleveland and earlier presidents who more closely adhered to constitutional limitations; just because our politicians now routinely pay mere lip service to the Constitution, does not mean that they are doing anything right, good, true; or something that’s better than the alternative of limited government that close conformity to the Constitution would have produced.
The mention of General Welfare in the preamble to that document cannot logically or legally be used as justification. If it is, then its wide embrace, so wide as to deny no spending program that can be construed as having some degree of impact, however attenuated, on the general population, will nullify the restrictions embodied in the list of enumerated powers. Why bother to enumerate powers as a method of limiting the objects of spending, that is why close the front door, if one is to open wide the back door of general welfare?
The truth is that our Congress steals our money and distributes it to states like Ukraine, and it violates the Constitution in so spending our money.
The only arguments in Washington are about the division of the spoils (the theft). Who will get what and how much? The impeachment gang isn’t defending the Constitution against the inroads of Donald Trump. They’re defending their positions of power and all the emoluments, gains of all shapes, sizes and forms, psychological benefits and profits of all kinds that come with these positions. Every president and every Congress has for a very long time done damage to the Constitution and has violated it in countless ways. It is impossible to have a government of our current size without this statement being true.
Ukraine-gate from this perspective is a power struggle, in which the constitution just happens to be the battleground because that’s where impeachment occurs.
But the real battle over what spending by Congress is legitimate and what is illegitimate has been fought long ago and settled with the victory of the forces of “anything goes”. Congress can take your money and use it to build rockets to Uranus all day long. The cost of harvesting an ounce of helium from its atmosphere may be a billion times the cost of getting it on Earth, but that won’t determine what Congress does. That will be determined by cost in conjunction with the competition for the division of the spoils stolen from taxpayers.
8:40 pm on October 24, 2019
