How did congress get inside my comode?

Our home toilets were pre-regulation vintage, though met the industrial standard of 3.5 gallons per flush. Then Congress got into the toilet business with The Energy Policy and conservation Act of 1992, which establishes the maximum amount of water that can be used by toilets and showers in private homes. Accordingly, toilets cannot use more than 1.6 gallons per flush, ostensibly to conserve water. Complaints with the new toilets were so rampant that the University of Arizona undertook a study to test them. They found these smaller toilets experienced more clogging and required multiple flushes to get the job done. While Congress regulated "gallons per flush" it neglected to regulate the mechanism by which the flushing is accomplished.

Two years ago, due to a freak accident, we had to replace the tank on one toilet. Installing a pre-1992 toilet even in your own home can result in a $2,500 fine. Thus our only option was to buy one of the new 1.6 gallon tanks, which to our consternation has been a problem ever since. Besides the extra flushes, the flapper valve does not always properly close. Once we discovered it had stuck open, permitting water to run all night. Some water savings, huh? Could the flapper problem be related to the size of the tank, I wondered? Eureka! A paper I had read on the subject years ago came to mind. Let me digress.

In 1974, I was involved with Adolf Schoepe to develop a high-tech machine. Mr. Schoepe was an ingenious and prolific inventor who emigrated from Germany after World War I. In 1946 he invented of the Kwikset lock and in 1959 a more efficient ball cock (flushing mechanism) for a toilet and thus founded Fluidmaster in Anaheim, California to manufacture them.  At the time, the U.S. was experiencing an energy crisis and water conservation was mandated in California. Someone come up with the crazy idea of placing a brick in the toilet to save water.  Adolf showed me an article he was writing for The Los Angeles Times, which showed why the brick idea was bogus and doesn't work. Remembering the physics from that article, I solved the flapper problem, i.e., the amount of water in a 1.6 gallon tank is insufficient to make a conventional flapper valve work consistently. But we will have to live with it because Congress has spoken.

What gave busybody lawmakers the right to stick their noses into my toilet? Judge Andrew P. Napolitano explains it well in The Constitution in Exile:  Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress just eighteen, specific, enumerated, delegated powers, no more. The first 17 clauses are very specific, but the 18^th, the "Necessary and Proper" clause (all laws necessary . . . to carry out the foregoing Powers), has been abused by democrats and republicans the last seventy years to grab power. For example, Congress used the Necessary clause to create a central bank, though the creation of a bank is not mentioned in the Constitution. Whatever is "Necessary" became whatever is "Helpful."

Today, Congress ignores Constitutional limits altogether and has given itself a vast array of new powers not granted by the Constitution. It regulates drinking age, speed limits, wages, working hours, farm quotas, crop prices, petrol formulae, even toilet sizes and the list goes on, though none of these powers are granted or even mentioned in the Constitution. Furthermore, Congress is now considering a host of other laws beyond its Constitutional power, like flag burning and who can get married.

Justice Felix Frankfurter commented, "The Constitution was not written in order to right every wrong. It was not written to allow every federal do-gooder and busybody to impose his notion of clean living, safe working, or pure thinking on individuals. It was written to restrain government from interfering with Natural Law: the freedom of the individual to pursue happiness." Toilets aren't mentioned.