{"id":713,"date":"2006-10-13T07:37:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-13T13:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/2006\/10\/dendahl-on-abortion-and-federalism\/"},"modified":"2006-10-13T07:37:00","modified_gmt":"2006-10-13T13:37:00","slug":"dendahl-on-abortion-and-federalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2006\/10\/dendahl-on-abortion-and-federalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Dendahl on abortion and federalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Gov. Bill Richardson has still not agreed to a debate with Republican challenger John Dendahl, so here\u2019s a column Dendahl wrote on abortion as part of a larger debate on federalism, taken from his Web site<\/a>. It was published in the Albuquerque Journal<\/a> on Nov. 14, 2003. <\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Abortion Debate Embodies Larger Federal Debate<\/span>
By John Dendahl<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/o:p><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cA 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThese 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSo 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\u2019s about federalism. Why is abortion the business of the federal government?<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhen 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\u2019s Federalist No. 17, for example, opened with, \u2018It 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.\u2019<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHamilton and other proponents of the Constitution promised otherwise. To help keep that promise, the Bill of Rights included this, the Tenth Amendment: \u2018The powers not delegated to the United States<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region> by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.\u2019 Loosely paraphrased, \u2018If we didn\u2019t put it in here, the federal government doesn\u2019t get it.\u2019<\/p>\n

\n

\u201c\u2018Murder\u2019 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 United States<\/st1:place><\/st1:country-region>, either, yet there are now a United States Department of Education and federal \u2018No Child Left Behind\u2019 legislation.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cOne could go on for pages about accretions of federal authority in the 214 years since the Constitution went into effect. This hasn\u2019t just happened.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSome language in the Constitution \u2014 notably the so-called spending (or welfare) clause, the commerce clause, and the \u2018necessary and proper\u2019 clause \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhen I consulted a learned friend about the subject of this essay, he asked whether I planned to address constitutional principles or \u2018the way the world works.\u2019 I\u2019ve now exhausted what I have to say about principles \u2014 I submit the federalist principles behind the Constitution have largely been trashed.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThis has everything to do with the utterly desperate fight going on in Congress over President Bush\u2019s judgeship nominations. It\u2019s not just Roe v. Wade, though that\u2019s the issue on the surface of the fight. <\/p>\n

\n

\u201cMore generally, it\u2019s about the eagerness of one side \u2014 President Bush\u2019s opponents in the U.S. Senate \u2014 to delegate ever more control of policy to judges expected to be \u2018imaginative\u2019 in interpreting laws and the Constitution, and insulated against removal by their appointments for life.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIt has been said that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. A great lesson probably lies in the trend of K-12 education performance \u2014 sharply downward \u2014 in the 25 years since the federal government became involved through creation of the Department of Education.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWe need to stop acting like frogs, obliviously complacent when plopped into a pot of cold water soon to be boiled.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gov. Bill Richardson has still not agreed to a debate with Republican challenger John Dendahl, so here\u2019s 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 DebateBy John Dendahl […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}