Congress violates Constitution
by delegating to bureaucrats

“All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States.”

The Constitution prohibits any of these powers to be delegated. Legislation is the work of representatives and the senators. Today, they are not doing their job. This unconscionable dereliction of duty is a large part of the reason that this country is on a wrong and dangerous course. This very Congress initiated and is carrying out  serious and deadly violations of our Constitution.

They have delegated their legislative power to bureaucrats and bureaucracies that have expanded their administrative power until they mimic the power of kings — absolute and unlimited. They have assumed the legislative, the executive and the judicial functions of their bureaucracy, the very thing that the Constitution was created to prevent. Our Constitution was designed to keep these functions of government separate and as checks against each other. Our Congress is refusing to do the hard work of creating our laws and the more difficult work of polishing the necessary details of each law they pass. This is, in effect, destroying our constitutional democracy.

Too many of our congressmen want to hand off the hard, difficult and time-consuming work to bureaucracies so they spend more time in getting re-elected and in protecting their $174,000 salaries and their perks. These bureaucrats spew out hundreds and hundreds of rules and regulations as administrators.

This evasion of our Bill of Rights subjects us to adjudication without any of the rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

We hear such statements as “under the rule of law,” “necessity is not bound by law,” while systematically our freedom, our liberty and our rights are denied by the super-legal power of “administrative law.”

We have the means of beginning a correction. That is the vote. But it must be used. And it must be used with serious knowledge and intelligence and intention.

— Carrol J.W. Fisher

Salisbury

Objective about Bible?

Butch Young and Donna Kesler think there is nothing wrong with teaching the Bible in Rowan County public elementary schools. I’m not quite there yet. I’m still struggling with the old-fashioned notion that parents who want religious education for their children, education that goes beyond Sunday school at their church, would send them to a parochial school like Salisbury Academy or Sacred Heart Catholic School.

I am also struggling with how a teacher can discuss the Bible objectively and critically as literature or history with public elementary school students. That seems like a tall order even at the high school level. Faced with children used to watching cartoons, the public school Bible teachers paid by the West Rowan Bible Teaching Association might abandon critical thinking and resort to memorization, catechisms and presenting religious views as facts.

Isn’t that religious indoctrination of young impressionable minds? Isn’t that entire enterprise incompatible with elementary education in our public schools?

— Pete Prunkl

Salisbury

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