Photo: Flickr/IXQUICK

Government is growing ever more intrusive and arrogant, George Will argues in an important new article:

The original constitutional structure has, [law professor Elizabeth Price Foley] says, been inverted: Citizens are required to convince the courts that laws restricting liberty are “irrational”; government should be required to articulate justifications for limiting liberty. The Founders’ goal — in John Adams’s formulation, a nation of “laws, and not of men” — has, Foley believes, “been taken much too far.”

The courts, Will concludes, “incit[e] governmental arrogance by deferring to it. So judicial deference often is dereliction of judicial duty.”

While Will describes a case at the local level, this trend is particularly worrisome at the federal level, where judges have assented to the growth of an extra-constitutional administrative state. Administrative agencies, Gary Lawson ably explains, justify their broad, unchecked powers using a dubious “rationality” argument. And “constitutional law buffs know that ‘rationality’–so-called rational basis review–is code for ‘the government wins.’”

Lawson sums it up colorfully: “When the basic institutions of modern administrative governance are at stake, the Court closes ranks and hurls the constitutional text into the Potomac River.”

This isn’t to say that we need “conservative activist judges” to undo the damage. Instead, we need judges who recognize the importance of the Constitution and America’s first principles. In their decisions, former attorney general Ed Meese insists, jurists should recognize “the importance of grounding their decisions on the bedrock of original understanding instead of the shifting sands of public or personal opinion.”

“…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” Photo: Wikimedia

“States don’t have rights,” Stephen Green reminds us. “Individuals do. It’s time we went about the business of restoring those rights, without alienating a huge constituency which suffered too long without them.” Green rightly argues that conservatives’ use of the language of states’ rights is not only muddle-headed but, for historical reasons, tends to associate conservatives with Jim Crow.

Nicola Moore and Eric Heis are undertaking an innovative project to raise youth awareness of federal overspending: they’re making a video game caled U.O.Me. They’re accepting contributions through mid-August to fund the game’s programming.

Realizing that spending is an issue of growing salience, progressives are rallying around new gimmicks like advanced rescission to bolster their budget-cutter bonafides. George Will is having none of it: the plan “certainly would not reduce deficit spending: Under the president’s proposal, if Congress kills the projects on the president’s list, the budgetary allocation would not be reduced, so legislators could dream up new things on which to spend the money.”

Timothy Carney, for his part, wonders if conservatives will look to military budgets as a source of savings.

E.J. Dionne says it’s ironic that conservatives who decry big government are calling for the federal government to more effectively manage the Gulf oil spill. Dionne, of course, is missing the point: there’s a difference between effective government (or energetic government, as Publius dubbed it in the Federalist) and big government. But all too many conservatives allow progressives to make such arguments by advocating for small government rather than a limited government that undertakes only its core responsibilities.

And last but not least, this is a clever submission to Google’s Search Stories campaign: