One of the two departments that Rick Perry could remember that he wanted to abolish was the Department of Commerce. He seems to forget that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power "To regulate Commerce … among the several states…" He also forgets that the Department of Commerce and Labor was created in 1903 during the tenure of the second good Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt. He forgets also that TR was the trust-buster, but Perry wants to be the lackey of today's trusts.
The department whose name he forgot is the Department of Energy. He probably wants to abolish it because, among other activities, it seeks to find alternatives to oil, something that made Texas rich, and to coal, something that made his bosses, the Koch brothers, rich.
The agency that he named to eliminate rather than the Department of Energy was the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that was proposed by President Richard Nixon. Its charge was to protect human health and the environment. So, he wants to stop the regulation of commerce that prohibits polluters, using Texas oil and Koch brothers coal, from putting their pollution in states downwind or downstream of the polluting sites.
If Perry is a favorite of some in the Tea Party who want a strict interpretation of the Constitution, where is his civic virtue? Civic virtue and common good are something stressed in the Federalist Papers, written by three of the signers of the Constitution: James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.
