"Pixel Dent" wrote in message
news
In article . net,
"Mike Rapoport" wrote:

We could dabate whether these fall under "provide for the common
welfare"
but lets not.

Mike
MU-2


The preamble, like the AIM, is non-regulatory ;-)

Exactly right. The Preamble is a statement of _purpose_ (why a government
exists), not a statement of _powers_.

If it designated powers, then Section 8 is contradicted and merely fluff.

Ignorant About the American Constitution?
by Walter Williams (December 10, 2003)

Article website address: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3393

The Federalist Papers were a set of documents written by John Jay, Alexander
Hamilton and James Madison to persuade the 13 states to ratify the
Constitution. In one of those papers, Federalist Paper 45, James Madison
wrote:

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the Federal
Government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State
Governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised
principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign
commerce; with which last the power of taxation will for the most part be
connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the
objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives,
liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement,
and prosperity of the State."

If we turned James Madison's statement on its head, namely that the powers
of the federal government are numerous and indefinite and those of the
states are few and defined, we'd describe today's America. Was Madison just
plain ignorant about the powers delegated to Congress? Before making our
judgment, let's examine statements of other possibly misinformed Americans.

In 1796, on the floor of the House of Representatives, William Giles of
Virginia condemned a relief measure for fire victims saying it was neither
the purpose nor the right of Congress to "attend to what generosity and
humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require." In
1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally
ill, saying, "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public
charity," adding that to approve such spending "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." President Grover Cleveland
was the king of the veto. He vetoed literally hundreds of congressional
spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s. His
often given reason was, "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in
the Constitution."

Today's White House proposes and Congress taxes and spends for anything they
can muster a majority vote on. My investigative query is: Were the Founders
and previous congressmen and presidents, who could not find constitutional
authority for today's bread and circuses, just plain stupid and ignorant? I
don't believe in long-run ignorance or stupidity, so I reread the
Constitution, looking to see whether an amendment had been passed
authorizing Congress to spend money on bailouts for airlines, prescription
drugs, education, Social Security and thousands of similar items in today's
federal budget. I found no such amendment.

Being thorough, I reread the Constitution and found what Congress might
interpret as a blank check authorization -- the "general welfare clause."
Then I investigated further to see what the Framers meant by the "general
welfare clause." In 1798, Thomas Jefferson said,

"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but
only those specifically enumerated."

The Constitution's father, James Madison said:

"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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is precisely the notion of the preambe giving unlimited powers that got
us into the mess that Mike finds offensive. Yet how many become
extraoridinarily evasive when faced with these points from the very people
that wrote the Constitution in the first place?