NSR: Houston Dynamo and BBVA Stadium Politics Discussion

Although I can't say that I'm a big fan of this kind of spending, it probably is Constitutional. The federal government has the absolute right to spend money on anything they chose to.

 

It does seem difficult to view as unconstitutional a widely-practiced activity of the Federal Government, said activity having many well-healed opponents, that no court has ruled as unconstitutional. Would not somewhere a challenge be filed if it had any chance of success?

 

Actually, that boldfaced part is a commonly held modern fallacy that the federal government is more than happy to perpetuate. The truth is, the Constitution says exactly otherwise, and not a single State would have agreed to it (ratified it back in 1787-90) had that been the case.

In fact, though I don't really have an opinion on the train itself, most of the money the US Congress spends today is in violation of the Constitution (including money spent on internal transportation projects within the States).

If you take a look at Article I Section VIII (where the federal legislature's powers are outlined) there are approximately 18 specific things that Congress is authorized to "lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" in order to fund. About 3 quarters of these delegated areas of Congressional authority concern foreign affairs and defense, with the remainder of the Congress' power delegated to things like running a post office, setting up the federal courts, prosecuting piracy, and establishing patent rights. At the end of Article I Section VIII the Constitution then states that Congress (in addition to taxing/spending to carry out the delegated powers) may pass laws "necessary AND proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States."

Nowhere in the federal Constitution, on the other hand, was there any delegation of power by the States to the federal government concerning transportation projects (especially transportation projects entirely within the boundaries of a single State). Therefore, authority over transportation projects, as was authority over everything else not specifically delegated in the Constitution to the federal government, remained in the hands of the States. This was the understanding of every single State ratifying convention during the ratification debates, and was freely admitted by the supporters of the Constitution (the federalists) during the ratification debates as a means of trying to persuade critics of the proposed Constitution (the anti-federalists) that the States had nothing to fear from the new Constitution and that they did not need worry about their sovereignty being violated by the newly proposed federal government under it. That is also why James Madison and other leading federalists were more than happy to see that the 10th Amendment...

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.

... was added (almost immediately after ratification) to the federal Constitution as the capstone of the Bill of Rights.

Of course, as we've seen especially in recent decades, the Constitution has often failed to prevent Presidents and Congresses (of all political parties and persuasions) from usurping powers that don't belong to them (that instead belong to the States, or to the people, respectively). As early as the 1790s, for example, Alexander Hamilton and the Federalist Party - wanting to use the power of the US government to incentivize the industrialization of America along the British model (and enrich themselves and their "Wall-Street" cronies in the process!) - were already trying to skirt the terms of the Constitution when it inconveniently got in the way of their political objectives (for example: setting up a national bank and appropriating Congressional funds to subsidize road-building projects not affiliated with the post office). And, the early Federalists wouldn't be the only ones trying to use federal appropriations to fund transportation projects. The Federalists continued to push their unconstitutional "internal improvements" bills though Congress (which now included money for canals and well as turnpikes) until after their demise in the wake of the War of 1812, only to have the National-Republicans pick up the call for spending on "internal improvements" under President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s. From the 1830s-50s the Whigs under Senator Henry Clay's leadership became the chief champions of "internal improvements," and when the Whig party collapsed after the Kansas-Nebraska fiasco, the Republicans picked up the mantle of "internal improvements" (which by now included federal appropriations to build railroads too) from the mid-1850s on.

For the most part, however, until the early 1860s the Federalists, the National-Republicans, the Whigs, and then finally the Republicans were stymied, either by the inability to secure majority support in Congress or by the veto pens of (mainly Southern) Presidents, in their efforts to spend federal dollars in violation of the Constitution on these "internal improvements" projects. Perhaps their most famous defeat came when President James Madison vetoed the famous Bonus Bill (which would have funded a federal turnpike across the Appalachians) in 1817.

Here is the relevant text in President Madison's veto message:

Having considered the bill this day presented to me entitled "An act to set apart and pledge certain funds for internal improvements," and which sets apart and pledges funds "for constructing roads and canals, and improving the navigation of water courses, in order to facilitate, promote, and give security to internal commerce among the several States, and to render more easy and less expensive the means and provisions for the common defense," I am constrained by the insuperable difficulty I feel in reconciling the bill with the Constitution of the United States to return it with that objection to the House of Representatives, in which it originated.

The legislative powers vested in Congress are specified and enumerated in the eighth section of the first article of the Constitution, and it does not appear that the power proposed to be exercised by the bill is among the enumerated powers, or that it falls by any just interpretation with the power to make laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those or other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States.

Ironically, however, James Madison was not actually AGAINST the IDEA of funding internal improvements (he had actually come around to believe that it would be beneficial public policy). He was, however, against "internal improvements" if it meant allowing the federal government to violate the terms of the Constitution by usurping the powers of the States. In other words, James Madison believed that guarding against tyranny (keeping the federal government from assuming ungranted power) was more important that enacting beneficial public policy - if a choice between the two must be made.

I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.

Still believing that "internal improvements" constituted good public policy, therefore (after he vetoed the Bonus Bill), President Madison subsequently drafted a letter to the General Assembly of Virginia (his State) encouraging Virginia to propose an amendment to the Constitution that would transfer (from the States) authority to the federal government to subsidize transportation projects. In other words, President Madison still wanted to do "internal improvements;" he just wanted to get the States to amend the Constitution first so that it would be legal (constitutional).

Of course, when the Southern States seceded in 1860-61 and President Lincoln and the Republican Party achieved uncontested control of the federal government, they no longer had to worry about the Democrats (mainly but not exclusively the Southern Democrats) getting in the way of their unconstitutional spending priorities. From that point on, unfortunately, beginning with the federal railroad subsidies, the United States government began redistributing untold millions (and eventually untold billions and trillions) of taxpayer dollars in the form of (unconstitutional) subsidies to both public and private ("corporate welfare") projects, and (notwithstanding the occasional objection, although not since the 1940s, by a federal court) we've haven't looked back ever since.

 

^^

Doesn't the judicial branch decide this question? How can your arguments be viewed as true unless the courts adopt those arguments?

 

Oh man!

Tldr!


Edit; sorry. Entered wrong thread. Move along. Nothin to see here.

 

Only if one buys the erroneous notion that the States, when in conventions assembled (1787-90) and all eventually voted to ratify the Constitution, agreed to the notion that the federal courts (a branch of the federal government whose members were appointed and ratified by the other branches of the federal government) were given by the States the exclusive right to determine the parameters of the federal government's own powers.

Provisions as such were not written into the actual text of the Constitution, nor were they understood by the States to exist at the time of ratification. In fact, the supporters of the Constitution (federalists) refrained from making that argument at the time because 1) most didn't think it did, and 2) even if it was included in some hidden provision that everyone overlooked at the time, the States would not have considered their ratifications binding if those ratifications had been done under false pretenses (meaning: the federalists "tricking" the anti-federalists into agreeing to the Constitution believing that it granted less power to the federal government than it actually did). Furthermore, in the most important ratifying conventions (Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts) the federalists went out of their way to calm the fears of the anti-federalists that this was not the case. Minus those assurances; no ratification by at least 9 of the 13 States.

To put it bluntly, if the States had believed in the late 1780s that ratifying the Constitution meant that a branch of the federal government would be the only "police" in regard to checking the power of the federal government to act beyond the parameters of the Constitution (that in essence the federal government would be allowed to "police itself" and the States would just have to "take it" if the three branches of the federal government conspired together to usurp the sovereignty of the States), very few, perhaps even none, of the States would have ratified it, for to do so, would have been to sign their own death warrants as sovereign political entities (what they had just spent 8 years on the battlefield waging war against the British empire to defend).

As Thomas Jefferson would write a few years later on the subject...

That, if those who administer the general government be permitted to transgress the limits fixed by that compact, by a total disregard to the special delegations of power therein contained, an annihilation of the state governments, and the creation, upon their ruins, of a general consolidated government, will be the inevitable consequence: That the principle and construction, contended for by sundry of the state legislatures, that the general government is the exclusive judge of the extent of the powers delegated to it, stop nothing short of despotism—since the discretion of those who administer the government, and not the Constitution, would be the measure of their powers: That the several states who formed that instrument, being sovereign and independent, have the unquestionable right to judge of its infraction.

Of course, we all know what happened shortly thereafter. Chief Justice John Marshall, in a handful of landmark 1790s/early 1800s Supreme Court rulings (most famously Marbury v. Madison), would - based upon a very, very loose interpretation of the text in Article III of the Constitution - establish via precedent the precedent of judicial review (having the federal courts review cases involving questions of executive or legislative action in regard to "constitutionality"), and over the course of many decades subsequent court rulings would be increasingly regarded as "definitive" by the establishment in Washington DC (with a vested interest of course in diminishing the power of the States to stand in the way of federal actions).

While there is nothing wrong in principle with judicial review (written BTW explicitly into some of the State constitutions at the time defining their own distributions of executive, judicial, and legislative power) as A means of checking the power of the Congress and the President (who, after all, would complain about a secondary firewall or layer of protection from potential oppression?), nowhere in the Constitution does it explicitly state (or even imply) that the Supreme Court (a branch of the federal government) has the exclusive right to judge the constitutionality of federal actions (stuff done by the other parts of the federal government) or that the States are denied the authority (which they assumed they had when they ratified the Constitution) to judge for themselves as well in regard to the constitutionality of federal actions. As a case in point, for example, at the Virginia ratifying convention, the federalist delegates assured their anti-federalist counterparts that should the federal government assume powers not delegated to it, that Virginia would not be expected to submit and would be well within its rights to declare those federal actions null and void within the State. Upon this understanding of the Constitution did Virginia chose to ratify.

And finally, simple logic throws a wet blanket on the modern misconception (commonly taught in modern government-school classrooms) that just because the federal courts choose not to strike down a federal act as unconstitutional (render their final ruling) that somehow means that it is necessarily legal and we all have to (including the States as the parties to the Constitution) submit to it unconditionally. If the States had agreed to such terms when they ratified the Constitution, they would have been enslaving themselves to their own creation. Remember: The States created the federal government and delegated to it a handful of powers so that the federal government could serve the States... not the other way around.

To link this post back to my previous one, it's not just the job of the Supreme Court to keep an eye out for violations of the Constitution, it's the job of every party to the Constitution (as every elected official at the federal and state level swears an oath to) to defend it. It's the job of the Congress not to pass unconstitutional legislation in the first place. It's the job of the President of the United States (see James Madison) to veto unconstitutional legislation if it gets to his desk. If both of those measures fail, there's certainly nothing wrong with the federal courts saying "No" to the President and Congress. And if all three branches of the federal government collude to usurp the rights or sovereignty of the States or the people, it is the job of the States - as the parties to the Constitution, the creators of the federal government, and the entities for whom the federal government was created to serve - to police their creation when the federal government proves unable or unwilling to police itself in terms of living within the constraints of its delegated authority.

Anyway, have a good night y'all, as I got work at 7:30am and I gotta get to bed.

 

That was Juve chelsea epic long. Man did that make my headspin

 

give me light rail or give me death!

 

I'm glad to see that America is investing in the future still. Infrastructure such as this may not make sense to all now but in the future it may help the economy.

 

My brain hurts.

How is the Constitution violated, or the rights of the individual States violated when the Federal Government decides to fully or partially fund a project that has been initiated by a State Government, a municipality, or a duly constituted political subdivision (Metro).

In the instant case, Metro has embarked on a program of expanding public transportation. The Federal Government is not usurping the powers of the State by providing a grant to Metro, that Metro specifically applied for.

I would argue that Article I, Section VIII specifically allows the federal government to spend money as it sees fit.

Section VIII

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States".

Grants, block grants, and the spending of federal money on inter and intra state transportation can be reasonably argued to "provide for the general welfare of the United States" just as can anything that Congress decides to spend money on. I don't see anything in the Constitution that would limit that right to spend - once those federal taxes are collected, it is the Congress and not the States that decides how they should be spent.

While I may not agree that 900 million dollars of federal tax money to Metro actually promotes the general welfare, but that's not my call - That call rests solely with those folks who were so designated under Article I, Section VIII.

At least that's how my simplistic un-legal mind sees things.

 

You must spread some reputation around before giving it to NigelBrooks again.

 

Relating to the Informative post of MBean.

I don't doubt that we have wound up with a Federal Government that is much different than that envisioned by some of our founding fathers and the States.

But isn't that the historical battle between strict constructionist view and the view of the constitution as a dynamic document.

And isn't it true the strict constructionist view lost?

This is not my understanding at all. Current law is that an act of congress is the law of the land UNTIL it is struck down by the Federal Courts. I don't think there is a question on this point.

Uhh ... Jefferson lost. Saying he should not have doesn't make it so.

 

Apparently our part of Texas has become the tree moving Capital of the World.

City spends $200K to move tree in street's way

At least in League City it couldn't be avoided, however, Houston seems to have been overcharged for moving a tree.

 

I'm sure that Metro will rationalize the spending of this money on an obviously non-transportation related matter - but 3/4 of a million for a tree moving and a memorial plaza seems excessive.

How about naming one of the Metro stations after MLK and incorporating a memorial into that station? Better yet cut down the tree and use the wood for benches at the station.

 

This sort of thing should be regulated.

 

I am no botanist-how do you move a tree without killing it? Hell, I can't move a sage that I planted a month before without killing it.

 

I have never seen a giant tree moved, but younger trees have the entire cubic area around the root system moved with the tree; however, it seems to me that a older trees root system would make this move very very difficult and would require cutting some of the roots and maybe killing the tree (like the reason for the very high price tag).



I did find this video [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9yiJcivMJ8"]Moving Large Trees Without Damaging Roots - YouTube[/ame] with a different method.

 

Our rail here is a joke. There are like 3 or 4 trains a day. So if you wanted to use it you'd have to follow their schedule rather than walk over to a station and catch a train.

I'm not arguing for rail. But Austin's rail is so poorly implemented that you can't use it as a gauge of Rail. I don't suggest that Hou Metro is doing it any better. I don't know.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_Light_Rail

14th highest ridership in the country. 2nd highest per mile.

 

He was talking about Austin i think

 

he said he didn't know about houston's, so i showed facts. which is like baseless hyperbole, but conscionable.

 

Austin's ridership is reported at 1600 per day. No one here believes it is that high. I've literally only seen a train one time. It was empty. I drive over the tracks a lot -- there is just never a train.

I bet Austin's true ridership is less than 160 a day.