A Federalist Christmas

It would be pleasant to believe that the judiciary will at long last declare it settled law that public institutions can reflect the holiday preferences of their communities. Sadly, too many civic boughs exist on which to hang complaints about the supposed establishment of religion and other expressions of community values, and the allowable differences across layers of government have been falling away like pine needles at the curb.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I took up the topic of the rapid nationalization of every detail of American life. He’s partial to blaming the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the right to regulate economic activity “among the several States.” With the 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court found room in those four words to instruct a farmer to destroy wheat that he’d grown to feed his own chickens because it obviated his need to buy wheat, thus decreasing national demand. With such legal reasoning available, the only economic liberties remaining to states and citizens are those that the federal government has not yet decided to usurp.

Indeed, on a “Mythbuster” page on her Web site, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) insists that the Commerce Clause makes Congress’s authority to regulate healthcare “essentially unlimited,” because “virtually every aspect of the heath care system has an effect on interstate commerce.” One needn’t be Jeremiah to worry that the next government epiphany will be that virtually every aspect of behavior has an effect on the healthcare system, thus justifying unlimited regulation of us.

Replying to my friend, I raised the specters of big budget spending at the national level and the Fourteenth Amendment. On the former count, the federal government has leveraged its largess with states much as a dealer might ply drugs to enslave a junky. States don’t have to heed U.S. government rules pertaining to education, healthcare, or even the maximum blood-alcohol level for drivers, but if they don’t conform, they stand to lose billions of dollars in funding to which the strings have been attached.

For its part, the Fourteenth Amendment has become the mechanism driving Christmas and other Christian holidays from the public square. Ratified in 1868, it effectively erased the distinction between state governments and the federal government with respect to the Bill of Rights.

Thus, the word “Congress” in the First Amendment has come to mean “government of any level within the United States or any other public employee or representative,” and the phrase “shall make no law” has expanded to potentially include municipal policies, decorating preferences, and decisions about school chorus programs.

Given the breadth and depth of the modern legal regime, countless other means of centralizing authority surely exist, and each and every one is likely to have some plausible justification. The Commerce Clause gives the United States national coherence on economic matters. The Fourteenth Amendment helped to lay the groundwork for the gradual elimination of race as a decisive factor in American life. And anybody who benefits from government grants, subsidies, and handouts will readily offer his or her own unique reasons for supporting federal spending.

The costs, though, are the homogenization of our culture and the diminution of our right to self-government.

The underlying assumption that an atheist should feel as at home as an orthodox Roman Catholic in any corner of the nation is at odds with the brilliant experiment that the Founders initiated. True civic freedom — truly representative government — must include the right to construct a community that reflects its members’ unique values. Furthermore, a dynamic society requires that its citizens be able to escape from communities with uncongenial values to others that are substantively different, without disclaiming their national identity.

Americans who want their towns to resemble a Norman Rockwell vision of the Christmas season have no right to threaten or disenfranchise the skeptics and gadflies in their midst. The gadflies, in turn, should have no recourse to the swamps of Washington, D.C., for a Grinch’s veto.

Justin Katz is administrator of AnchorRising.com, an independent media and conservative analysis blog.