Legislative Arguments vs Red Herrings

     The blurb under the title of this blog reads: "The Original Intent of the Framers was neither Conservative nor Republican. Rather, it was about Individual Sovereignty."
     "Individual sovereignty was not a peculiar conceit of Thomas Jefferson: It was the common assumption of the day..."[1]
     But it doesn't seem to be individual sovereignty the Tea Party is calling for with its well-intentioned desire for large spending cuts. While larger cuts rather than smaller ones are better, with the eventual intent of once again balancing the budget, the specific cuts that are made are what are important. I have heard few specific suggestions or desires in this regard, with the exception of Obama-care.
    House Tea Party members renewed their support for cuts of $60 billion, in a press conference by Eric Cantor. The Democrats and Republicans seem to be meeting somewhere near $33 billion in cuts. Tea Partiers are calling for heads to roll in 2012 if the larger number isn't met.
    But it is a number that seems to have been pulled from thin air. Why $60 billion and not $600 billion? Perhaps it is only because the smaller number seems do-able. But it does nothing to help restore individual sovereignty.
    The fight ought to be about ending Federal programs that are not within the limitations of the Constitution, not about 'over spending'. If we actually had enough money and could balance the budget without cutting spending, would the Tea Party movement have two legs to stand on?
    What about stopping funding for things like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)? As I write this, "a congressional panel will hold a hearing on legislation — the “Energy Tax Prevention Act” – to stop.....the constitutional crisis created by EPA’s attempt to dictate climate policy to the nation. EPA can neither make climate policy nor amend the CAA without flouting the separation of powers."[2]
    How much money was spent to create these 18,000 pages of legislation? By the EPA's own estimates, the direct costs of implementation alone will be $65 billion--but how much did it cost to research, then author, this massive take-over of the American economy? The EPA acknowledges that its climate policy leads to “absurd results” that are contrary to congressional intent, with operating permits required of millions of non-industrial facilities such as office buildings, stores, restaurants, etc.
     Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.) are sponsoring the Act. On a newscast I saw, after Upton was interviewed speaking about how the EPA has no Constitutional authority to do what it now proposes, a citizen opponent of the Act was blaming Upton for causing massive damage in the future, to the environment--by stopping the un-Constitutional actions of the EPA, if they are indeed found to be illegal.
     Did this citizen have a desire to allow the EPA to act un-Constitutionally? If she did not, the network pieced together their news with arguments that had nothing to do with each other; or her argument was a red-herring.
    We can ask why opponents use red-herring arguments; but a better question would be to ask why the networks pit such wrongful arguments against each other? Could the network in question not find someone who didn't have a red-herring to throw, someone who could speak to the question of Constitutionality?
     Congressmen and Senators do the same kind of arguing. "The basic idea is to 'win' an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic."[3] Was it the intent of the network to lead the attention away from Upton's concern; or is it the general thinking of the opposition not to address the Congressmen's concerns, to lead the attention away from the fundamental questions on their own?
     Red-herring arguments seem to be typical of the Tea Party, as much as they are typical of most of Congress, and of State's legislatures. 'Spending cuts' that don't address the issue of why a particular budget item is wrong from the perspective of an American's individual sovereignty, is not going to win many converts. Sure, we can all support the cuts. But can we all support the particular reasons for the particular cuts?
    It would be to the benefit of the Tea Party advocates who actually understand what individual sovereignty is about, to advocate particular cuts based on the illegality of what is being funded.

[1] Kelly L. Ross in a review of 'American Sphinx, The Character of Thomas Jefferson', by Joseph J. Ellis
[2] Andrew Brietbart Presents Big Government
[3] The Nizkor Project   

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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