Roscoe Bartlett: “we need to get back to constitutional government. Thomas Jefferson said, The government which governs best is the…”

“we need to get back to constitutional government. Thomas Jefferson said, The government which governs best is the government which governs least. Now we are a million miles from his dream of what his country would be at this time in history. And we need to look at our Constitution at what our Founding Fathers believed the Federal Government ought to be doing. And there are several things that we spend a lot of money on, and I will challenge my colleagues to go to Article I, Section 8, and that is the part of the Constitution that delineates the appropriate functions, the allowable functions of the Federal Government, and find any justification for philanthropy. I really believe in philanthropy, but they did not believe it was the proper function of the Federal Government. We will see no hint there that we should be involved in health care other than the health care of our military people. We are responsible for them. We will find absolutely no hint that we should be involved in education. As a matter of fact, for the 24 straight years when the SAT scores were falling lower and lower and lower in our schools, the Federal Department of Education was getting better, bigger and bigger and bigger, and exerting more control over education. We contribute about 6 percent, 5.9 I think is the actual number, percent of the funds for education. We would like to have 100 percent of control. We just need to get back to constitutional government.”