These Ayn Rand wannabes are a blight on their constituents.
As the political heat intensifies around the Flint water contamination crisis, Rep. Justin Amash stands by himself among the Michigan congressional delegation by opposing federal intervention and assistance.
Amash, R-Cascade Township, takes the position that the state should be at the forefront in responding to the crisis.
"While the U.S. Constitution does not authorize the federal government to intervene in an intrastate matter like this one, the State of Michigan should provide comprehensive assistance to the people of Flint," Amash said. "The residents who were harmed deserve an independent, nonpartisan investigation, and the persons responsible for this crisis must be held accountable."
Hey, Michigan. How does it feel to have elected this jackass?
Charles Pierce has much more:
The logical fallacy here is that the state of Michigan has demonstrated that it was at first unwilling, and then unable, to provide comprehensive assistance to anyone anywhere, and that it was the state of Michigan, in the person of its incompetent governor, that acknowledged this by requesting the federal aid in the first place. The constitutional fallacy is what we can call Originalism Amok. There is nothing unconstitutional about federal disaster aid, whether that involves the water in Flint, or tornadoes in Alabama, or hurricanes in Florida. That has been established without constitutional challenge ever since the passage of the Federal Disaster Assistance Program in 1950. They are allowed under the spending power the Constitution provides to the national legislature. (In 1984, the general principle of expanding the use of the congressional spending power within the states was allowed by the Supreme Court in South Dakota v. Dole.) This is the difference between constitutional governance and constitutional fetishism.
