George Leef reviews for Forbes readers key points within U.S. Sen. Mike Lee’s book about attacks on the American constitutional system.
[A]lthough elected officials take an oath to uphold the Constitution, many vote for legislation that tramples all over it.
One public official who takes the Constitution very seriously, however, is Utah’s junior senator, Mike Lee. In his new book Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document, he makes the case that the country has badly departed from the wisdom written into our government’s foundation.
And he makes that case very effectively, by discussing the actual decisions that have been so ruinous, along with the events and people behind them. Readers get will become engrossed in the key turning points where parts of the Constitution were lost.
Each of Lee’s chapters is illuminating, but perhaps the most memorable is the one on the way the meaning of the First Amendment’s “establishment clause” was tormented into an absolute prohibition against any connection whatsoever between government and religion.
All the Constitution says is that Congress shall make no law establishing a religion. What that meant, Lee notes, was that the Founders were against allowing religion to become a national issue, with Congress deciding to favor any church through official support. The states were left free to have whatever law regarding religion their people wanted. …
… Another of Senator Lee’s stories concerns the demolition of the concept of federalism – that the federal government has only the specific powers granted to it. The Founders wanted to keep federal authority strictly limited to just a few truly national functions and thought they had accomplished that by enumerating the powers given and clarifying in the Tenth Amendment that all others were reserved to the states or the people.
Their efforts at putting limits on federal power were often challenged in our earlier history, but the dam held pretty well until the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. An impatient, domineering man, FDR couldn’t stand the idea that the Constitution kept him (and his compliant Congress) from taking any steps he wanted to deal with the Depression and otherwise expand the scope of centralized power.
