[Laser] Tutorial.

[Steve Schear]

At 01:06 PM 1/3/2002 -0800, Jason Creager wrote:
>I'm an entertainment laser professional who deals only with medium and
>large frame lasers. I'm a Certified Field Service Technician for Coherent
>Innova 90 and I-400 series. Philosophical arguments against the powers of
>the FDA because there isn't specific wording in The Constitution to enable
>the creation of such an entity may make you feel better, but they do as
>much good as peeing into the wind. The FDA and CDRH exist and there isn't a
>damned thing you'll EVER be able to do about it. Thank God they do, too.

Ha, ha, ha...

>Yup, like everything in this world, they are not perfect. The FDA is far
>from perfect, but without someone to regulate food and drugs we'd still be
>living like pioneers in the old west never knowing if the latest cough
>elixir has strychnine in it or not. Arguing against everything that isn't
>specifically outlined in the Constitution is pure and completely pointless
>rhetoric. You might as well get rid of the DMV, FAA, and FCC at the same
>time.

Look, I know that these agencies were established with good intentions and 
even sometime achieve these lofty goals.  Still, accepting regulation 
without lawful basis is accepting tyranny.  We are either a nation of laws 
or men.  There really is little in between.  All of today's Americans have 
grown up in a time of greatly decreased civil liberties.  Many or most have 
grown accustomed to their narrowed liberties or never known them.

The authority of many federal agencies rests on the Commerce Clause and it 
is only by recent court opinions which approach the legal equivalent of 
ecclesiastic arguments over how many angels could fit on the head of a pin 
that we have these agencies.

The central vision of limited Commerce Clause power lasted until Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt�s presidency in the 1930s. Under FDR�s New Deal, the 
federal role ballooned out of all recognition. During FDR�s first few years 
in power, the Supreme Court struck down one New Deal law after another, 
holding again and again that they exceeded Congress� constitutional powers.

Roosevelt became so frustrated with the Supreme Court that in February 1937 
he proposed legislation which would increase the number of Supreme Court 
Justices from nine to fifteen. As President, FDR would get to nominate six 
new justices who would uphold his new laws. Under the threat of this plan, 
one judge � Justice Roberts � began to vote for, rather than against, FDR�s 
legislation. That made all the difference.

It soon became evident that Congress could do almost anything it wanted 
under the expanded theory of the Commerce Clause. In 1942, the Supreme 
Court ruled against a farmer who grew his own wheat on his own land and fed 
it to his own chickens and cows. Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942). 
Even though he never sold the wheat, much less across state lines, by not 
buying wheat from other farmers, he had affected interstate commerce enough 
to bring him within the new scope of the Commerce Clause. From that moment, 
most legal scholars assumed that Congress could assert power over virtually 
anything under the Commerce Clause.

There is a Constitutional mechanism for changes in the basic laws of our 
nation, it called an amendment.  The founders made the amendment process 
intentionally difficult because such changes should be undertaken with only 
the most serious consideration.  By turning a key passage of the 
Constitution on its head, through creative "re-interpretation", bypassing 
the requirement for an amendment and creating an end-run on limits to 
Federal authority is tyranny and the results unconstitional.  Plain and 
simple.  Might as well not even have a Constitution.  Become like Britain 
where there are no firmly established limits to government authority and 
your rights are only what Parliament deems them to be at any particular time.

steve

"Fiat justitia et ruat caelum" (Let justice be done though the heavens 
fall.) --legal maxim originating with the Senate of Rome.