The 10th Amendment Task Force

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Mr. CONAWAY. Well, I thank the gentleman from Utah for yielding and for hosting this night's hour to talk about the Tenth Amendment and federalism.

It's probably been read into the Record 11 dozen times, but I want to read a quote from James Madison into the Record that sets the tone for what I want to talk about.

James Madison, in Federalist 45 said: ``The powers delegated to the Federal Government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects such as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. And the powers reserved to the several States will extend to all of the objects in which, in the ordinary course of affairs concerns the lives, liberties and properties of the people.''

Mr. Speaker, I'd argue that therein lies much of the problems that we face today as a Federal Government. Since 1995, this Congress and the various administrative agencies across this vast Federal Government have issued some 60,000 new rules and regulations, everything from regulating the size of the holes in Swiss cheese to the colors for surgical sutures. And I would argue that the size of the holes in Swiss cheese probably should be defined by the folks in Wisconsin where they do a lot of cheese. But a Federal rule, Federal law that delves into that detail into the, as Madison would have referred to it as the ordinary course of affairs that concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people, that's a government that's overreached.

Part of our problem is we send people to Congress who are, at their core, can-do people, solution people, folks who want to solve issues. And our focus here is on every single problem. While our Constitution, though, says that we really are limited by the powers granted in the Constitution to this government as to those problems which we ought to take up, clearly national defense, clearly homeland security, post office roads as the phrase is used. But much of what we deal with every single day here in Congress is beyond those limited powers, because we are solutions-oriented kinds of folks and it's our nature to grab the bull by the horns and move forward with it, losing sight, of course, that the Constitution says that's not a real good thing for us to be doing.

Let me reemphasize that last sentence: ``The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.''

Mr. Speaker, that's an awful lot of the area of lives that committees like Education and Workforce or Labor, many of the committees up here deal in the ordinary course of affairs of the lives of people.

Now, part of the rancor that we see across this country related to the Federal Government is a sense of powerlessness by the good folks back home over issues that really ought to be dealt with back home.

This rage that we're seeing is driven by an overreaching Federal Government. Decisions that are best made at the local level and controlled by those people are being usurped and taken care of by 435 people here in Washington and the 100 Senators on the other side. And much of that frustration at being out of control is as a result of this Congress taking over jobs and areas that are much better left to counties and cities and States as the Founding Fathers had intended. If we were to quit delving into their personal lives affairs and ordinary course affairs, much of the conflict that is out there would disappear and would be focused on the local level where the decisions are made best as to the solution that best fits those local folks.

I get asked often by mayors and county judges and city councilmen and county commissioners and school superintendents and others, What can we do to help? What can we do to address the growing size of this Federal Government? One of the ways I ask them to help is to do a better job of vetting your requests to me and to your Federal Government for help. Make sure that whatever it is that you're asking us to do is a good idea, that there is a nexus to the Constitution, that there is a link in the Constitution that delegates the powers to this Federal Government for it to even deal with the particular problem you're bringing to us.

I would argue that much of our overspending today is driven by goodhearted people who have lost sight of the 10th amendment, have come up here and asked for help from this Federal Government, not of course realizing the strings that are going to be attached to the Federal laws that get put in place, when the solution would much better have been dealt with at the local level. Federalism, as my colleague from Utah has just stated, it's not really a left or right issue. It's not really a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. There are good things to be had by both sides. Both sides of the aisle should be able to embrace this concept so that the States do most of the heavy lifting and the counties and cities and local governments do the work that deals with the issues confronting their people. So this really shouldn't be a particularly partisan effort as we move forward.

My friend mentioned earlier about the idea that the States should be the incubators or the laboratories for experiments with how government addresses a particular program. There are two examples that I can think of off the top of my head. One is the health care experiment going on in Massachusetts. They've been at it now 3 or 4 years and it's different than what they thought it would be, they may not be able to push that to the scale of the United States, and the people of Massachusetts are struggling with how to pay for health care under the universal plan that they've put in place where everybody was mandated to have insurance. It doesn't look to me like it's working. Why would you then want to take that policy and try to extend it across the United States? I don't think you would.

An area where it has worked, and I'll brag on Texas. Six years ago, Texas put in place a tort reform program that limited the punitive damages on medical malpractice suits. So we've had a 6- or 7-year experiment involving 25 million people in Texas and it has worked. Doctors are coming to Texas because their malpractice insurance rates are lower, and the citizens of Texas are getting the care that they need. If a hospital and a physician make a mistake, the economic damages in trying to put that person back to as close to what they would have been before the mistake was made, that gets done. But these punitive damages, which sometimes just defy logic, are no longer on the table in Texas.

And so that experiment, as the President called for in his health care speech, to test medical malpractice reform in and around the country, I would argue that we've had a 6-, almost 7-year test now working with the State of Texas on medical malpractice reform, tort reform, that really works. So in that vein, to the extent that this would be needed at the Federal level to deal with the vast medical programs that we have in place, could be replicated on a much larger scale because we've had a big enough test through the State that it makes sense.

Let me finish up by saying that because they lived 230 plus years ago, we sometimes give our Founding Fathers short shrift as to how intelligent they really were. We think because we are the most intelligent people walking the face of the earth, that we've got all the great ideas, that we don't really need to look back in the history to see and understand what they had in mind.

Quoting Madison again out of the Federalist Papers, ``The powers delegated to the Federal Government are few and defined.'' That means if you've got a plan that doesn't fit under one of those powers, then the Federal Government really at the end of the day should not pass laws that deal with that. We should have the backbone to say, ``That's a really tough problem, it's really important to people, but it's not the Federal Government's responsibility to address that. You need to work within your own system back home to address that issue.''

That's one of the hardest things Members of Congress do. We hate to tell constituents, ``No, that's really not something that the Federal Government should be dealing with,'' and yet that really should be the answer to many of the requests that we get from back home, is that these aren't federal issues. Quoting Madison again, ``Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, such as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which again in the ordinary course of affairs concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people.''

Mr. Speaker, I would argue that all of us would learn a much better appreciation of how limited this Federal Government really should be if we were to go back and take a look at our Founding Fathers' comments and just periodically read the Constitution. It is a requirement on my staff, and I've introduced legislation that would encourage Members of Congress and their staffs to read the Constitution once a year. We all have the little pocket versions that we write in the front cover. When's the last time that we read the Constitution? It's not a long tome. It's 2,500 words or so. It's not like trying to wade through War and Peace. You can sit down and read it and understand exactly what your Federal Government should be doing, and then everything else is left to the States.

With that, I appreciate the time from my colleague from Utah.

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