Department Of Transportation: Fill & Download for Free

The 10th Amendment.The Constitution forbids the Federal Government from interfering in areas not specifically enumerated to it by the Constitution.Accordingly, the Federal Government has no business having a Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education, Interior Department, Agriculture, Labor, Housing and Urban Development, or Department of Transportation, or any of the agencies within those departments.Imagine how much lower our taxes would be if the Federal Government were small enough to fit within the Constitution, and how much less government intrusion we would feel in our lives. That was what the Framers of the Constitution tried to give us, if we don’t ruin it.

Let’s unpack this, shall we?She isn’t saying we should simply “get rid of Homeland Security”. She’s said in several places that we should tear down ICE and CBP and replace them.DHS as an entity has only been around since 2002. It was one of the knee-jerk reactions in the aftermath of 9/11, and more than a few people (including me) think it was a mistake.It would be a very good thing to break up DHS altogether and return its pieces to something similar to the way they were before 2002. Give the Coast Guard back to the Department of Transportation. Bring back INS as part of the Department of Labor.CBP in particular is, in my opinion, beyond rescue. Learning that the head of the agency was part of the private Facebook group where racist memes about immigrants and members of Congress were shared was really the last straw. It needs to be wiped out and rebuilt from scratch.

When I was in the US Attorney’s Office, I got a call from Army counsel that the police in a Northeast Pennsylvania town had stopped and seized a military tractor trailer hauling an M1 Abrams tank. My first response was “WTF?”The tank was being transported from a facility in NJ to a base in PA and the cop stopped it for exceeding the weight limits allowed on a bridge over the Delaware River. The police cited the driver for exceeding the weight restriction without having a permit issued by the Department of Transportation, and impounded the truck and tank. The army counsel had no luck getting the police to release either so they contacted our office to represent the driver in court on the citation and to litigate getting the vehicles back.I figured there was no way the state had the authority to enforce a rule of the road against the Army, just as the state has no authority to insist that Post Office vehicles have license plates. So I called the Department of Transportation’s chief counsel, figuring they’d intervene quickly. I was wrong. They insisted they had the right to enforce the permit requirement and impound the tank until the citation was resolved. No amount of screaming on my part made them budge and I ended the conversation telling them they better have the keys to the truck and my freaking tank back to the Army within the hour.I should have done some research before I popped off. Turns out, there was an Army regulation requiring vehicles to obey local traffic laws, including weight restrictions, and authorizing states to enforce their laws against personnel who violated them. The regulation contained exceptions for emergency situations and national security but for the most part, gave the local cop the right to stop the truck and cite the driver. You learn something every dayWe ended up in court but worked out an agreement with the Department of Transportation and the local police to have the vehicles released with a promise that the government would pay the fine. The driver pleaded guilty to the citation and the US Treasury coughed up the fine and costs.