MISSOURI COMMENTARY: GIVE TO STATES; TAKE FROM STATES

We are half way into one hundred days of Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Maybe it is time to get a sense of the direction in which our government is heading.

-- Balanced Budget Amendment. The Senate came within a whisper of passing Constitutional amendment to balance the budget. The proponents were not willing to enshrine protection of the Social Security Trust Funds in the Constitution, although they were ready to make almost every deal short of that.

To get the vote of Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia, the proponents of the amendment were forced to accept a new clause stating that the federal courts were without power to enforce the amendment. When a person or a corporation or a governmental entity acts in an illegal or unconstitutional manner, the courts are the means by which the matter is rectified.

In stripping the courts of any power, the Balanced Budget Amendment becomes legally unenforceable. If Congress were to work its way around the amendment with gimmicks and contrivances, there would be no way to challenge the Congress other than by "the will of the people."

If Congress were to try to balance the budget while the economy was headed south, then the country would be in big, big trouble. Herbert Hoover and Andrew Mellon both devoutly believed in balancing the budget and they balanced the nation into the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt, who didn't really comprehend what Lord JOhn Maynard Keynes was espousing, went on a balanced budget binge in 1937, triggering an additional downward spiral. Economic principles are inherently elastic. Freezing one economic principle into the fabric of a constitution is risky business.

-- School lunch. It's an old land venerable federal program premised on the not-so-radical notion that youngsters learns better if they have a meal in their stomachs. We've had the school lunch program longer than Newt Gingrich has lived. Now, with no scandal or allegations of irregularity, we are about to reduce the funding and turn it over to the states to play with.

Remember that the states, by and large, did nothing about school lunches for hungry kids and it was this absence of attention that, in part, caused the federal government to get into the business in the first place. The states, we are told, can do things better and on the cheap. One wonders.

-- Food stamps. This program was also scheduled to be cut and dumped on the states. Up pops the farm state lawmakers who declare this program to be in the interest of our nation's farmers and hence not capable of being run by the states. If school lunches can be unloaded on the states, why not food stamps?

Kansas Congressman Pat Roberts, Chairman of the Agriculture Committee, states with respect to food stamps, that the federal government knows best. With $25 billion of agricultural products at stake, Chairman Roberts was not about to let the states mess around with any cockamamie schemes like handing out cash grants instead of coupons. No siree. We'll keep this baby right here in Washington, where we can keep our eye on it and protect our farmers.

-- Welfare reform. The governors are beginning to smell a rat -- that Congress will dump this one on the states with inadequate funds to operate it. The leaders of the National Governors' Association (three Republicans and three Democrats) have said that the presently-designed welfare block grant won't work if there is a recession. Governors maintain they want jurisdiction over various federal programs, but only if they can have an automatic claim on the federal treasury.

-- Product liability. We swing 180 degrees. Instead of shifting authority to the states, the Congress is now about to take authority from the states. Matters of tort law, wrongful acts in which a civil action will lie, are typically and historically state matters.

Congress now is stating that the states aren't up to the job on the product liability side of tort law. States are supposedly wonderful at doing most anything else. They are soon to be wonderful at handing school lunches. They perhaps will be wonderful at handling welfare. But they are a bunch of bumblers when it comes to product liability.

In the era of Uncle Sam shipping programs out of Washington, this one gets shipped in. In the era when the big, bad federal government can't do anything right, on product liability the feds are all-wise.

The current notion that the federal government must be dismantled hits some roadblocks even in a Republican Congress when conservative interests and special circumstances cause the most conservative legislators to admit that there are circumstances where maybe the feds know best.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.