Gov. Bill Richardson has still not agreed to a debate with Republican challenger John Dendahl, so here’s a column Dendahl wrote on abortion as part of a larger debate on federalism, taken from his Web site. It was published in the Albuquerque Journal on Nov. 14, 2003.
Abortion Debate Embodies Larger Federal Debate
By John Dendahl
“A loud din has arisen from opponents of the national ban on partial-birth abortion signed into law by President Bush on November 5. I might actually agree with them but, if I did, our policy reasons would be light years apart.
“These opponents want no government hassling doctors who perform abortions. Completely to the contrary, I believe partial-birth abortions should be illegal. As I understand it, each is performed well after the victim has achieved viability, so I see no ethical distinction between this act and the intentional killing of a newborn.
“So we disagree completely on the ethics. My inclination to question the law just signed by the president is that he, rather than a governor, signed it. It’s about federalism. Why is abortion the business of the federal government?
“When citizens were being asked to adopt the U.S. Constitution, fear of a large and powerful central government was perhaps its greatest obstacle. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison spoke to this eloquently in their collected essays, The Federalist. Hamilton’s Federalist No. 17, for example, opened with, ‘It may be said that (federal legislation) would tend to render the government of the Union too powerful, and to enable it to absorb those residuary authorities, which it might be judged proper to leave with the States for local purposes.’
“Hamilton and other proponents of the Constitution promised otherwise. To help keep that promise, the Bill of Rights included this, the Tenth Amendment: ‘The powers not delegated to the
“‘Murder’ and its synonyms do not appear in the Constitution. Most legislation defining and punishing the unlawful taking of life, including abortion, is found in state laws. Nothing can be found delegating any role in education to the
“One could go on for pages about accretions of federal authority in the 214 years since the Constitution went into effect. This hasn’t just happened.
“Some language in the Constitution — notably the so-called spending (or welfare) clause, the commerce clause, and the ‘necessary and proper’ clause — has been stretched and stretched to infer this increased federal reach into our lives. It has been like boiling a frog, starting with cold water and gradually turning up the heat until the animal is cooked and dead.
“When I consulted a learned friend about the subject of this essay, he asked whether I planned to address constitutional principles or ‘the way the world works.’ I’ve now exhausted what I have to say about principles — I submit the federalist principles behind the Constitution have largely been trashed.
“The way the world now works is for special interests to seek satisfaction through acts of Congress signed by the president or, failing that, through the federal judiciary. I might not like the U.S. Supreme Court’s invention of a right of privacy that led to voiding the abortion laws adopted by most or all of the states, but those who applauded that decision in Roe v. Wade are now furious about the federal ban of partial-birth abortions.
“This has everything to do with the utterly desperate fight going on in Congress over President Bush’s judgeship nominations. It’s not just Roe v. Wade, though that’s the issue on the surface of the fight.
“More generally, it’s about the eagerness of one side — President Bush’s opponents in the U.S. Senate — to delegate ever more control of policy to judges expected to be ‘imaginative’ in interpreting laws and the Constitution, and insulated against removal by their appointments for life.
“It has been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. A great lesson probably lies in the trend of K-12 education performance — sharply downward — in the 25 years since the federal government became involved through creation of the Department of Education.
“We need to stop acting like frogs, obliviously complacent when plopped into a pot of cold water soon to be boiled.”