In Defense of the Elastic Clause of the Constitution
If college students listened to Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I recently spoke at Emory University, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.
Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.
But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.
From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.
The Elastic Clause, he persisted, gives the president the power to address a wide range of issues through executive prerogative. It allowed the government, he said, to adapt to new circumstances unlike the age when the Founders wrote the Constitution.
Of course the Founders did include an “elastic clause” of sorts, namely Article V, which gives the people and the states the power to amend the Constitution.
But he wasn’t speaking of something quite so stiff and formal. He wasn’t referring to something that required broad assent. He was referring the Elastic Clause that allows the president to swiftly respond to needs as they arise – sort of like Mussolini and Mugabe did.
He was serious. He really believed the Elastic Clause was real. But the constitutional literacy of a different student was even worse. With a straight face, she defended the exercise of executive power and the issuance of executive orders as constitutional because of the inaction of Congress.
“It’s part of the Constitution that if the Congress doesn’t act, then the president can issue executive orders to fix something,” was her argument.
Even more frightening, the person saying this is an officer of the campus Democrats. A little totalitarian in training.
Naturally, this was all quite an eye opener. I’m no fool when it comes to the institutional left and their corrosion of the system. But to have a student debate me over a verifiably fictional constitutional provision, to have a student presume I was the one making things up when I said the Elastic Clause didn’t exist – that blazed new territory.
All of this illustrates the dangerous rot occurring on campus, facilitated in large part by the faculty. All signs point to their success. Students are learning the lexicon of the institutional left and producing tragic-comedy like complaining about equality at UCLA, and worse. My appearance at Emory was sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the College Republicans. Recognize that groups like these are fighting an uphill battle on campus. But without them, college campuses would be intellectually monolithic.
The talk at Emory wandered into the small discrete psychological components of tyranny as described brilliantly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. No doubt Mr. Elastic Clause and College Democrat Vice President Edict had never heard of the Nobel Prize winning description of where elastic ideas can lead.
Solzhenitsyn’s great book of the 20th century describes the small ideas of totalitarianism, and the camouflaged embryonic consent that individuals give to tyranny over time. Tyranny isn’t just about gruel with potato peelings day after day and bullets to the back of the head.
I presume Mr. Elastic Clause and Ms. College Democrat Officer will never read Gulag, but if they did, they would learn the story of Georgi Osorgin. Osorgin was imprisoned in the Solovetsky Islands in the early 1920s. The date was important because American leftists (such as some Democrats of the 1960s) like to pin the mass murder system only on Stalin. But Solzhenitsyn documents that the gulags were a necessary part of Lenin’s vision of the International Brotherhood. Without terror, his system would not work.
Osorgin was to be shot, but he begged his jailers for a few more days because his wife was coming to visit him at the gulag. Osorgin’s wife visited him, then as her boat pulled away from Solovetsky Island, keeping his part of the bargain, he undressed to be shot. Niceties were part of the gulag in the early days because nobody really knew where the fledgling system was headed.
Solzhenitsyn:
But still, someone did give them those three days. The three Osorgin days, like other cases, show how far the Solovetsky regime was from having donned the armor of a system. The impression is left that the air of Solovki strangely mingled extreme cruelty with an almost benign incomprehension of where all this was leading, which Solovetsky characteristics were becoming the embryo of the great Archipelago and which were destined to dry up and wither on the bud. After all, the Solovetsky Islands people did not yet, generally speaking, firmly believe that the ovens of the Arctic Auschwitz had been lit right there and that its crematory furnaces had been thrown open to all who were ever brought there. (But, after all, that is exactly how it was!)
People there were also misled by the fact that all their prison terms were exceedingly short: it was rare that anyone had a ten-year term, and even five was not found very often, and most of them were three, just three. And this whole cat-and-mouse trick of the law was still not understood: to pin down and let go, and pin down again and let go again. . . .
Here too, on the first islands of the Archipelago, was felt the instability of those checkered years of the middle twenties, when things were but poorly understood in the country as a whole. Was everything already prohibited? Or, on the contrary, were things only now beginning to be allowed? Age-old Russia still believed so strongly in rapturous phrases! And there were only a few prophets of gloom who had already figured things out and who knew when and how all this would be smashed into smithereens.
I explained to the students that a written Constitution, free from the phony Elastic Clause and power for a president to issue edicts, is what keeps them free. It is what lets them have fun and have a good life. Structural constraints on the power of government allow people to experience joy, worship God, build dreams and fulfill potential. Our Constitution does not have an Elastic Clause for a very good reason. It was established to be inelastic absent the consent of three quarters of states. It was established to lay down fundamental ironclad restraints on the power of government, especially the executive branch.
Some are trying to redefine freedom away from this ideal and toward freedom from want.
That it is becoming fashionable to reject our particularly American version of freedom deserves an overpowering response.







Long ago, when I was a college student we wanted freedom above most everything else. Now these poor young souls want to grant authority to some distant jackass with the likely end result that they have no hope of becoming any more than obedient serfs as a vision for their future.
If these young morons don't wake up then the only bright light I see in my future is the fact that I will be leaving the planet before I have to endure theirs.
What is wrong with them?
The Necessary and Proper Clause is as follows:
The Congress shall have Power ... To make all Laws which shall be 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, or in any Department or Officer thereof. UNQUOTE http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_Proper_Clause
Would not a historical review of this clause be appropriate?
That essay would have to show that the student had a firm grasp on exactly what was within those two documents.
Not going to hold my breath....
Wikipedia saved me from parroting only the approved agenda (and undoubtedly gave several of my instructors headaches). Not as a primary source, no - but in providing references to "respectable" sources that I could use.
Unless it is some obscure subject, Wikipedia moderators are pretty good at killing bias soon after it appears. Much sooner than respected academic bodies do - ref. the latest ICD interim code set that greatly expands the scope of "mental illness." Advocates for people with difficult to diagnose physical maladies haven't managed to fix that one in five years of fighting.
If you want to see some idiocy that surpasses anything I've ever seen on Wiki, read that article on slavery I linked to at The Nation. It is a marvel of BS.
As just one example, it claims unnamed doctors involved in the slave trade apparently wrote unnamed papers which helped end cholera. Well, no one knew exactly what cholera was before the London epidemic of 1854. So how could a then outlawed slave shipping industry have done such a thing? Even today no one understands its precise mechanism.
It just a BS agenda put out by liberals obsessed with the idea slavery built America and much more. It has no footnotes and important quotes are not even cited. It's much worse than Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera
And of course you can help end cholera without knowing its mechanistic cause, provided you can identify the conditions under which it does (and does not) spread. History 101: Sanitation long preceded the germ theory of disease...
And if you do suspect that something is off, you can see the revision history of the article as well as the behind the scenes discussion of the article. Neither of those is available in a traditional encyclopedia, which is also - being a product of humans - subject to political influence, making Wikipedia superior to its competitors.
I AM enjoying this. It's like talking with 'reasonable', 'rational', truly thoughtful and intelligent peers. (Slap on forehead), This IS talking with 'reasonable', 'rational', truly thoughtful and intelligent peers.
I realize that no ONE person can be right all of the time. I enjoy the discussions ABOUT the subjects for the sheer pleasure of discussion. I'm also a fanatic on being right. I would rather be humiliated into being right than arrogantly lauded for being wrong. I want the truth of things even if it proves me wrong. ESPECIALLY if it proves me wrong. I don't like being wrong. I'm not wrong often, to my dismay, so it's a real treat for me for someone to prove to my satisfaction that I AM wrong. That person has done me an inestimable service and will be a friend to me for life. I do appologize for the rant.....;-}.
I certainly appreciate the civil discourse. Thank you.
It is called situational ethics, and the left/libs have it down to a science.
After enumerating the specific powers of Congress, the framers wanted it understood that Congress has the power to dictate how those powers were to be executed by the President:
To make all Laws which shall be 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, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
The President's authority is further limited by this clause, not expanded. Congress has the authority to make the laws the President must follow as he executes the enumerated powers of Congress. The President doesn't get to come up with his own rules for things like:
Borrowing Money
Regulating Commerce
Establishing a Uniform Rule of Naturalization
Coining Money
Punishing Counterfeiters
Establishing Post Offices and Roads
Declaring War
Raising Armies and Navies
etc....
The President doesn't get to make up the rules of how to execute those powers. Congress does this, and the President executes those powers as Congress declares he must.
So the young ignoramuses are off base not only on what branch of government has this power, but also that this power itself is limited and not really “elastic."
Long ago, when I was a college student we wanted freedom above most everything else. Now these poor young souls want to grant authority to some distant jackass with the likely end result that they have no hope of becoming any more than obedient serfs as a vision for their future.
If these young morons don't wake up then the only bright light I see in my future is the fact that I will be leaving the planet before I have to endure theirs.
What is wrong with them?
But the goal is never about what is said at the moment, but how the thing being said advances the agenda of the moment.
And like you say, they haven't really thought out the consequences of what happens when the shoe is on the other foot.
Unless, of course they are 14-year old girls: They can then purchase "Plan B" without anyone's consent or even knowledge. Because they are so mature, you know.
It is how they have lived since kindergarten, in a thought-controlled PC environment even if all the class material was conservative (which of course it was not!). They cannot comprehend an alternative. Stockholm Syndrome writ large.
Rightthink, a keyboard, superior judgment and sheer hubris seems to trump experience and common sense. It may be the Google-lization of American youth. That together with the sense of a vast moral superiority of the last 5,000 years of human civilization is marked in contrast to the old school which looked back and found wisdom and mistakes to learn from. With the new school, it's just all mistakes.
Having said that, I am often startled on how this new generation doesn't know the most elementary things, like Pearl Harbor or Cleopatra's family.