When Representative Paul Ryan unveiled his long-awaited anti-poverty agenda as part of his "Better Way" initiative last June, he expressed what were, to conservatives, familiar misgivings about the welfare state. It was expensive. It was bureaucratically complex. It had failed to conquer poverty. Yet the report also took as a given that "repairing the nation's safety net" in order to "cure poverty and prevent it" was the responsibility of the federal government. In a significant sense, one could say Franklin Roosevelt had won: Even conservatives were arguing about the best way to fulfill the national government's responsibility for the material well-being of the populace, but not about whether it bore that responsibility in the first place. Yet, at least theoretically, many conservatives would revolt at hearing the idea so starkly expressed. That tension between theoretical concerns about the welfare state and, in practice, an acceptance — even embrace — of its broad contours and basic premises haunts conservative attitudes toward the New Deal and its legacy.
The tension is nowhere thicker than in constitutional theory. Orthodox constitutionalists almost universally agree that the New Deal derailed the regime the framers designed in Philadelphia in 1787. The eruption of legislative activity in Roosevelt's first 100 days in office — eventually blessed by the Supreme Court in the equally furious outbreak of judicial activity beginning with West Coast Hotel v. Parrish in 1937 — is widely assumed to form a partition separating a long period of limited national government from one of concentrated central authority.
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