Slashdot Mirror
Net Neutrality — Threat Or Menace?
Roblimo writes "I had a dream. In it, I was CEO of a large telecommunications company that was also a major broadband Internet provider and all five members of the FCC were stabbing me with pitchforks and yelling in my ear that my company would be treated as a common carrier, not as a special entity they couldn't regulate. That's when I woke up..."
"What is constitutional is what the Supreme Court decides is consitutional, that's how the system is set up."
This is a very common misconception, and it is common because that's what they want you to think. But in fact, that is not the way it was set up at all. During the Constitutional convention, something called The Virginia Plan was proposed. That plan called for putting into the Constitution language such that the Federal government could override state law whenever the two conflicted. That plan was overwhelmingly voted down. After the Constitution was drawn up, before the States would ratify it they called for reassurance that the Federal government would only have power over those 18 things, and that all other power was left to the states and to the people. The Supreme Court can declare that certain things are un-Constitutional, but it is not the final arbiter of what is Constitutional. Only the States are empowered to do that.
... 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
(1) The Federal government only has legal authority over the 17 (some say 18) enumerated powers that are specifically listed in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 8. Everything else belongs to the States and to the people.
(2) NO branch of the Federal Government, including the Supreme Court, was given authority to decide what the Federal Government may or may not do. That power was left to the States themselves. Allowing the Federal government decide what its own powers may be is called "putting the foxes in charge of the henhouse", and the Founding Fathers were much too smart for that. Want proof?
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." -- Thomas Jefferson
"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.
"...the government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." -- James Madison
"[T]he government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself." -- Thomas Jefferson, about the U.S. Constitution [emphasis mine]
"Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste." -Thomas Jefferson to Gideon Granger, 1800.
"I consider the foundation of the Constitution as laid on this ground that 'all powers not delegated to the United States, by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states or to the people.' To take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possessio