Administration "open-minded" about GM bailout

Forget the Constitution, forget the enumerated powers of the federal government, when it comes to the economy, the Obama administration is "open-minded" about the prospect of using tax payer dollars to bailout GM and Chrysler. From Bloomberg:

Task Force Open to Auto Aid, Avoiding Bankruptcy, Rattner Says

By John Hughes

March 17 (Bloomberg) -- The Obama administration is “open minded” about giving General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC more aid and will use “all the resources” of the federal government to avoid bankruptcy for the automakers, said Steven Rattner, chief adviser to the U.S. Treasury’s autos task force.

U.S. auto suppliers may get some aid, and the task force plans to meet a March 31 deadline for assessing GM and Chrysler viability, Rattner said yesterday in an interview. “We are open minded about committing additional resources to ensuring a viable domestic car industry,” he said.

source

Gone are the days when politicians looked upon the Constitution as their rulebook, and with a sense of duty to their Constituents, strove to limit the power of the federal government in the spirit of Constitutional Republicanism.

There is now no limit to what the politicians will consider as a justifiable exercise of power by the federal government. The federal government of the United States is no longer a limited government as setup by the framers of the Constitution. It is an all-powerful central government that decides how much freedom to afford the people. It can interfere and intervene in any sector of the society. The Constitution is merely a relic of a distant past, with no bearing in political decisions.

In times like this, a review of James Madison's quote expounding his fears of an all powerful federal government seems fitting:

"If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress.... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."

-James Madison, the father of the Constitution