Charity begins at home, not in the House or Senate

Sockdolager!--A Tale Of Davy Crockett:

"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money."

Thus Col. Crockett is quoted as addressing the House on the question of a private bill to provide funds to the widow of a naval hero of the War of 1812. Somewhere in my disordered files I may still have my copy of the Virginia Commission on Constitutional Government pamphlet where I first encountered this story back in the Sixties.

I was reminded of this by Judge Andrew Napolitano's remarks on John Gibson's Fox News Channel show this afternoon in regard to the president's plans to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast after Katrina. The Judge pointed out, correctly, that there is no constitutional authority to spend money in this way. He also noted that the courts have repeatedly refused to hear cases claiming Congress has acted outside its authority in the spending of public funds on the grounds that the people have it in their power to change the membership of Congress if they do not approve of what it is doing.

This is, of course, an unconscionable cop out. One of the purposes of the Constitution is to restrain mere majority action. What if Congress voted to deny blacks the right to vote? Would it matter if all the members who voted for such a proposal were re-elected? Of course not; such an act of Congress would be null and void because it is in direct contravention of the Constitution and no court would hesitate to say so.

I haven't investigated the links at the bottom of the page where the Crockett story appears, so I can't say whether any of the rest of the materials are useful. But I have read Sockdolager! as it appears on the linked page, and it is as I remember it from forty years ago. I have put this on the blog as a preface to my own remarks on the constitutional issues raised by FEMA, Katrina, etc.