Many people see a President trying to make people's lives better and help them out. Other people see a president trying to cut through a morass of laws and set up some clear laws for dealing first with privacy, and now spam.
Whether this was done intentionally or not, (though I have my reasons to believe that it was done intentionally), what I see is Bush is setting up a dangerous legal precedent to strip all powers from the States. I'm not the only one echoing these fears. Both of the articles I linked above note that the laws passed by Dubya overrule stricter state laws. How does that protect the consumer?
Some Short History
Originally, when we were founded as a country, we were set up as a confederacy (not to be confused with the Southern Confederacy), which meant that we were only bound together very loosely, and the States individually had supreme power.
This didn't work very well for various reasons in the minds of many people, and so a convention was convened in Philadelphia to amend the Articles of Confederation. What ended up happening instead was the creation of the Constitution, and the birth of our country as a Constitutional Republic. Now it was still important that our States have their supreme power, and the ability to make rules that usurped the power of the federal government, and even more importantly, that the people themselves retained all of their natural rights. That is the meaning of the 10th Amendment when it says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
This is the idea around which the Civil War was fought. That each State should have the ability to determine it's own position and direction and destiny instead of having it handed down to it by the Federal Government. When Abraham Lincoln took power and made it known that he intended to interfere in economic issues, and slavery (though he was honest that he didn't personally care about the fate of black people. Lincoln, for whatever other merits he may have had, was a terrible bigot. Read this if you'd like to know more.), the South rebelled to preserve their way of life, backwards as it was.
As much of a win for the rights of individual people and especially Slaves, the triumph of the North lead us into a slow death of State's rights, where each State could no longer make a decision based on what was best for it's citizens. Everything was decided by distant senators and representatives influenced by the powerful, who have more to influence to peddle, and much more to gain.
What's At Stake?
wait...am I talking about then, or now???...I lost track... It doesn't really matter. The issues that mattered then, still matter now, and we've entered into another time where the rights of States, and therefore the rights of the individual are under attack. States like California want to do things like legalize marijuana for cancer patients. But they won't be able to, because federal law has criminalized marijuana. States like Vermont want to allow their citizens to carry guns when and where they want to. But they won't be able to, because federal law will soon trump state law, and what was once your individual right to make your own decisions is no longer so. And all of this came about because of seemingly harmless laws that are being passed that set a precedent stating that federal laws are a higher standard than state laws.
This is not what the founders of our country envisioned. This is not what the men who died at Antietam, and Bull Run, and Fredicksburg shed blood for. This is not what the men froze to death for at Valley Forge, or stood their ground for Lexington and Concord. What they believed was what it says in Article X of the Bill of Rights: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."
A right that the administration is actively working to strip away. Don't let it happen.
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