10-29-2009, 11:21 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Junkie
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General welfare clause
This has been brought up in several discussions by various people to support the constitutionality of congressionally mandated health insurance. I submit the following to refute that claim.
Quote:
The Taxing Clause, using the words "general Welfare," (Art. I, Sec. 8) states: "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States . . ."
Hamilton always denied that this clause gives Congress a general legislative authority--to legislate regarding, and so as to achieve, whatever Congress might consider to be for the common good. He never varied from his assertion in The Federalist number 83, regarding the plan of the Framing Convention expressed in the Constitution, with regard to such authority, as follows:
"The plan of the convention declares that the power of congress or in other words of the national legislature, shall extend to certain enumerated cases. This specification of particulars evidently excludes all pretension to a general legislative authority; because an affirmative grant of special powers would be absurd as well as useless, if a general authority was intended." (Emphasis per original.)
Hamilton never contended for--indeed, he evidently would have opposed strenuously--use of the Federal power to tax and spend so as in effect to give the Federal government indirectly any control over anything, or anybody, which is not directly and openly authorized by the Constitution and its amendments through enumeration of the powers granted to it by the people. He would undoubtedly have agreed with the distinction which Jefferson drew--in the above-mentioned addresses made after Hamilton's death--with regard to Federal aid to Education: that land-grants in aid of education are constitutional, partly because they could not possibly produce any degree of control over the recipient institutions due to such grants being a single-transaction measure as to each of the recipient institutions.
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Limited Government In Relation to Some Fields of Power Prohibited to the Federal Government
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"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
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