George Will?s latest Newsweek column includes praise for one of the nation?s greatest Democratic presidents:
“We are in this race,” proclaimed an Obama-Biden campaign publication, “to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” Actually, much lobbying is defensive, seeking to fend off regulatory burdens. And government sets the agenda for lobbyists by drawing them, as a magnet draws iron filings, to its activities that allocate wealth and opportunity. Obama promises to expand government’s role regarding health care (17 percent of the economy), energy, adjusting the planet’s thermostat and many other matters. These promises guarantee increasingly frenzied lobbying.
If Democrats really wanted to discourage “special interests,” they could follow the example of Grover Cleveland, the last Democratic president who understood the federal government as the Founders did?as a government of limited, because enumerated, powers. “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government,” wrote James Madison in Federalist Paper 45, “are few and defined.” And so in 1887, President Cleveland vetoed the Texas Seed Bill, which appropriated $10,000 to purchase seed grain for drought-stricken farmers. Cleveland said: “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.”
