The
powers granted to Congress are listed in Article I, Section 8 of the
Constitution. They are limited and enumerated. The list is only 429 words long.
Our Founding Fathers were so fearful of a powerful central government they
added the Tenth Amendment, 28 words, to reinforce the concept of a limited
federal government with all other powers reserved for the states and the
people. Those 457 words are easy to read and understand. Nowhere in those 457
words does it say the federal government should control healthcare, provide
cell phones for the poor, fund television and radio, or perform any other
benevolent act. If we want to expand the role of the federal government, then
an amendment to the US Constitution is required.
To
reinforce how much the Constitution’s meaning has been twisted and tortured
beyond its original intent, I have copied excerpts from a good article by
Walter E. Williams:
James Madison is the acknowledged Father of the Constitution.
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who
fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James
Madison wrote disapprovingly, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that
article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on
objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
A few years later, James Madison’s vision was
expressed by Representative William Giles of Virginia
In 1827, Davy Crockett was elected to the House of
Representatives. During his term of office a $10,000 relief measure was
proposed to assist the widow of a naval officer. Davy Crockett eloquently
opposed the measure saying, “Mr. Speaker: I have as much respect for the memory
of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there
be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead
or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to
the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that
Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity.
Every member on this floor knows it. We have the right as individuals, to give
away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of
Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.”
In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a popular
measure to help the mentally ill saying, “I cannot find any authority in the
Constitution for public charity.” To approve the measure "would be
contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the
whole theory upon which the Union of these
States is founded.”
The framers addressed the misinterpretation of the
“general welfare clause. James Madison said, in a letter to James Robertson,
“With respect to the two words ‘general welfare’, I have always regarded them
as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a
literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a
character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its
creators.” James Madison also said, “If Congress can do whatever in their
discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the
Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an
indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” James Madison laid out what
he saw as constitutional limits on federal power in Federalist Paper Number 45
where he explained, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the
federal government are few and defined . . . to be exercised principally on
external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."
Thomas Jefferson explained in a letter to Albert
Gallatin, “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general
welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.”
The
full article can be found here: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/fee/constitution.html.
It is well worth a read.
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