Rick Perry Has a Powerful Weapon in the 10th Amendment

Don Rasmussen, writing at the Daily Caller, talks about how the 10th Amendment could be a valuable tool for a Rick Perry for President campaign:

Rick Perry seems to have calculated that the most powerful political weapon at his disposal is the 10th Amendment. Speaking to donors in Colorado on Friday, Perry expressed his personal belief in the sanctity of traditional marriage while in the same breath acknowledging New York’s right to go its own way on gay marriage. The carefully crafted strategy is both consistent with Perry’s long-held belief, or at least his rhetoric, in the primacy of the states in the strict constitutional sense while also providing cover on the most contentious social issues that Perry will face if he runs for president.

Whether it’s gay marriage, medical marijuana, education or a host of other issues, Perry’s strong stance on the 10th Amendment allows him to have his cake and eat it too. In his 2010 manifesto, Fed Up, Perry wrote:

“When states take on the federal government, I am hopeful that it will jump-start a conversation about the importance of federalism in our system of government, and the need to restore the balance of power between the central and state governments.”

Perry goes on to praise Congressman Rob Bishop and his 10th Amendment Task Force, endorsing Bishop’s call for “the decentralization of power through the restoration of American federalism.”

This strategy insulates Perry from attacks on the right for his accommodation of controversial positions. With the rise of the Tea Parties and their focus on strict, literal constitutionalism, there is less space for the strident Christian right to demand the kind of national social policies that infuriate the left and are used to scare the pants off of the middle.

Nevertheless, the reaction from evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics was swift. Rick Santorum took up the banner of the nationalist social conservatives, tweeting: “So Gov Perry, if a state wanted to allow polygamy or if they chose to deny heterosexuals the right to marry, would that be OK too?”

I frankly thought that was a dumb response from Santorum, and reflected an ignorance of the Constitution while at the same time taking a cheap shot at Mitt Romney and his Mormon beliefs.

If you're going to support a strict interpretation of the Constitution, then you have to be willing to allow states to approve things that you yourself might not like. I've never been a fan of Constitutional amendments to solve social issues like marriage or abortion. The 10th Amendment language is pretty clear:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, if the Constitution doesn't specifically give power over an issue to the Federal government, the states then have the power to regulate it as they see fit. The only way the courts got around that with the issue of abortion was the finding of the mystical right to privacy, even though that wasn't in the Constitution anywhere. I still have hopes that Roe v. Wade can be overturned, not just because of my opposition to abortion, but because it was a judicially unsound ruling. It's bad law.

Unfortunately, our judicial system is littered with liberal judges who don't feel the states or the people should have a say in anything.  That's how we end up with case law like Roe v. Wade or other decisions that ignore 10th Amendment powers.  I'd love to see a presidential candidate who thinks the Constitution means what it says and would support a decentralization of control back to the states.

People will then have the option to address those issues on the state level.  If you don't like what your state has done, you have the option of persuading your fellow citizens to change the law, or you can move elsewhere.  I'd love to see the day when it was not longer possible to get a federal court to force policies on states that those states do not wish to have.