Gov. Perry likened the intrusion of the federal government to boiling a frog: Heat the water slowly and gradually so the frog doesn't react until it's too late and it perishes. Thus, Perry opposes constitutional-law-professor-turned-President Obama's massive federal intrusion into the states via the "bailout" plans.
But the resistance represents too little, too late.
In describing the constant blatant assault on the Constitution, one hardly knows where to start. The federal government runs Social Security, a 50-state Ponzi scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like an underachiever. What about Medicaid? It is a federal/state program of health care for the poor. What about the Department of Education? It unconstitutionally involves the federal government in state-run education and comes with rules and mandates attached to the money.
Gov. Perry, mind you, intends to accept some federal bailout money because, as he puts it, Texans sent Washington the money in the first place. He refuses, however, to accept federal money, such as unemployment compensation dollars, because of the strings attached. But the very unconstitutionality of the federal government engaging in activities beyond those specified under Article I, Section 8, and sticking its nose -- conditions or no -- into the lives of the states doesn't seem to bother him. In other words, it's OK for the federal government to play nanny and violate the Constitution -- provided it does so without strings.
Ever since the ratification of the Constitution, federal lawmakers have attempted to circumvent it. President Franklin Pierce vetoed an 1854 bill to help the mentally ill, saying, "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity" and that such spending "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded." And President Grover Cleveland, when vetoing an 1887 appropriation to help drought-stricken counties in Texas, said: "I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds. … I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."
Today large numbers of Americans, to the extent that they even know about Article I, Section 8, couldn't care less about it.
FDR personified this view at the swearing-in ceremony for his second term. He later said that when it came to the words "support the Constitution of the United States," he thought, "Yes, but it's the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy -- not the kind of Constitution your court has raised up as a barrier to progress and democracy."
What 10th Amendment?