Wealth & Money Quote by Joe Miller

Miller’s line is doing two things at once: policing sincerity and shrinking the state. By leading with “we as a people need to stop being disingenuous,” he frames the debate as a moral failure, not a technical disagreement among lawyers. That move is strategic. If your opponents aren’t merely wrong but dishonest, you don’t have to engage their constitutional theories; you get to prosecute their character.

The key phrase is “all-encompassing power,” a deliberately elastic description that invites listeners to pour in whatever they already dislike: federal regulation, administrative agencies, surveillance, social programs, bailouts. It’s constitutional originalism packaged as populism. Notice how “the Constitution provides for” is treated like a plain-text receipt: a document with obvious limits that elites have “exercised” past the point of legitimacy. The verb matters. Power isn’t democratically authorized here; it’s “exercised,” like a muscle that’s been overtrained into something grotesque.

Then comes the fiscal hinge: “bankrupt position.” This is the standard conservative braid of constitutional and budgetary arguments, tying legal legitimacy to debt anxiety. The subtext is that expansive government isn’t just inefficient; it’s unconstitutional, and therefore the nation’s financial distress is a kind of constitutional karmic payback. The time frame - “the last several decades” - nods to the post-New Deal, post-Great Society expansion of federal authority without naming programs, keeping the critique broad enough to unite a coalition.

Contextually, this rhetoric fits the Tea Party-era mood: anger at deficits, distrust of Washington, and a suspicion that governance by bureaucracy has replaced governance by consent. It’s less a constitutional seminar than a permission slip for rollback.