Malcolm Hoar wrote:
In article , (Doug Miller) wrote:
In article , "J. Clarke"
wrote:
The power to tax is granted to the government by the Constitution. So
is the power to establish a budget. By the reasoning above both of
those powers may be used to secure the general welfare. As can
others.
Well, yes, but the point is that "to secure the general welfare" is *not* a
blanket authorization for the Congress to exercise powers that are *not*
granted to it.
Sadly, it seems that securing the general warefare has become
*exactly* that kind of blanket authorization. I do agree with
you; this was almost certainly NOT the intent of the framers.
Sadly so. Here's what happened. In the throes of the depression, Franklin
Roosevelt wanted the federal government to jump start the economy by doing
things it clearly was not authorized to do under the Constitution. But he
couldn't get the laws he wanted to stand up. The darn Supreme Court kept
declaring them unconstitutional. So he threatened to have Congress increase the
Supreme Court from 9 to 15 judges, and pack it with new blood who would support
him. This pressure led the Supremes to back off, which led to a massive
expansion of the federal government to what we have today. One of the things
they did was to use the clause in the Constitution that says Congress shall have
the power to regulate commerce among the states in a way it was never intended.
Before Roosevelt, the clause meant what it says - the commerce clause was used
to regulate commerce. Now, it's used to regulate schools, small businesses, and
a horde of other things it was never intended to do. Here's how it works.
Suppose there's a small local bakery in your town. It hires only local labor,
buys its flour and ingredients locally, and sells its baked goods out of its
front store. That doesn't look much like interstate commerce, does it? But the
local mill it buys its flour from buys the wheat it grinds into flour from a
farmer who raised the wheat on his farm fifty miles away, which just happens to
be across state lines. The result? The local bakery's local purchase of wheat
has a down the line "effect" on interstate commerce, so Congress jumps in to
regulate this purely local business, regulating not only the purchase of its
flour, but how much it pays its employees, the bakery's working conditions, and
on and on and on ...
You get the idea? Our federal government finds its power to grow so large, not
from the preamble saying the Constitution's purpose is to promote the general
welfare, but from a gross distortion of the commerce clause and similar
distortions of similar grants of power. Among other things, the result has been
a virtual disappearance of the 9th and 10 Amendments.
It's time to throw all their damned tea in the harbor again.