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Please tell me what part of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to band texting and driving?
I won't even address the issue of it being dangerous to text while you drive, the only issue I have is does the Constitution give the Feds the power to band texting and driving? Probably not! The Constitution doesn't give Congress the power to create the interstate highway system. They used the lame excuse that the interstate freeways were for the military's use, not the public's use to justify the constitutionality of them. LaHood seeks federal texting-while-driving ban By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is urging Congress to enact a national law against texting while driving. "We have to be able to get people to understand that this is very, very dangerous behavior," he says. Distracted driving has been LaHood's signature issue. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia now have bans on texting while driving. "When we started three years ago with distracted driving, it was not on anybody's radar," he says. "Only eight states had (texting bans)." Two separate studies by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that bans on hand-held cellphones and on texting had not reduced crashes. "While there's no question that cellphone use and especially texting by drivers is distracting, there's no evidence that laws enacted so far have cut crashes," IIHS spokesman Russ Rader says. But LaHood says that when such laws are diligently enforced — as they were during National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) studies in Syracuse, N.Y., and Hartford, Conn. — crashes do go down. Meanwhile, NHTSA is changing the way it measures fatalities related to distracted driving, using a narrower, more focused definition that will enable local police officers to more accurately pinpoint distraction as a factor in crashes. Previously, among distracted driving fatalities, NHTSA listed deaths caused by careless driving or those in which a cellphone was merely present in the vehicle; those categories have been removed from its new category, "distraction-affected crashes." LaHood compares the new approach to the way NHTSA changed its methodology in 2006 on drunken-driving crashes. Prior to 2006, any crash in which a driver, pedestrian or bicyclist had a blood alcohol level of .01 or higher was an "alcohol-related crash." In 2006, the agency began using the measure "alcohol-impaired driving crashes," to include only those in which a driver or motorcyclist had a blood alcohol level of .08 or higher. Using the new methodology, NHTSA reports 3,092 distraction-affected crash deaths in 2010, which LaHood says cannot be compared with the 5,474 "distraction-related" fatalities in 2009. However, he says other indicators, such as the National Occupant Protection Use Survey, in which trained data collectors at random intersections actually observe drivers in their vehicles, indicate that distracted driving is still "a significant problem." That survey found that the percentage of drivers texting or visibly manipulating handheld devices increased from 0.6% in 2009 to 0.9% in 2010; handheld cellphone use remained steady at 5%. "Distracted driving, we believe, is still underreported," LaHood says. LaHood also will announce Thursday that updated data shows there were 32,885 traffic fatalities in 2010, the lowest level since 1949. Early projections from NHTSA in March had found 32,788 road deaths. There were 10,228 drunken-driving deaths in 2010, down 4.9% from 2009. |