Generally Specific
I find the complete overthrow of our constitution largely laughable; it is hard to imagine how such a detailed and exhaustive document could so easily be taken out of context. At the focal point of this pure irony is the ”general welfare” clause of Article one, Section eight. Ever since the 1930’s, under the federal courts of the New Deal, these clauses have been so blatantly taken out of context that they deserve a bit of discussion. Despite the “misinterpretation” in this case, it will be shown that the founders not only predicted such a thing occurring, but a means to remedy it and what the clause actually meant.
Article one, Section eight defines and delineates the powers of Congress. Clause one states, “The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises: to pay for the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States: but all duties, imposts, and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.” After this, an exhaustive list of powers are provided, such as the power to coin money, regulate foreign commerce, declare war, etc. This list is very specific; it lists exactly the powers that Congress has, which will be noted in a moment.
Regarding “general welfare”, many people consider it a grant of power to Congress so that it may pass laws that provide well…welfare in a general sense. They use this to apply to national healthcare, federal student aid, and even in some cases foreign aid. And this would be the case-if that was what was intended. Unfortunately, the founding fathers never intended this. James Madison, in regards to the general welfare clause, stated, “With respect to the 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.” Essentially, he said that the general welfare clause was not an independent grant of power. It was a statement of how Congress would carry out its duty as a branch of the federal government. In order for it to be carried out, he said, the other powers must be used.
As further proof, Madison also states, in Federalist no. 46, that, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which remain to the state governments are numerous and indefinite.” How, if this is the case, is the word “general” specific? Is “general” specific? Of course not! Common sense tells us this.
There are even literary rules of interpretation that apply in this case. David L. Cooper, an infamous biblical scholar, produced a guideline for how to interpret the Bible in 1947, but the rules apply just as well to the constitution. The first rule is to “Discover the Author, the people addressed, and the life and times of the people involved in a given case.”According to this rule we must understand the author and the people of the time.
Around the time of the Revolutionary War, American colonists were angry at the British Parliament inconspicuously ignoring their constitutional right of “No taxation without representation.” They had a legal right to this, but since Parliament was considered above the law, Parliament changed this to provide financial relief from the debts accrued from the French and Indian War. Eventually, to fix this problem, the colonists foug ht and won a war of independence to secure these long-held constitutional rights. After this, they proposed the federal system of government under the Constitution, in which all governmental bodies were under the law, and could not alter it without the approval of the other half holding amendment rights, state or federal. In Article one, Section eight, they listed specific and defined powers by which Congress could operate. They wanted to avoid allowing the new Congress to pass any law not specifically delegated to it by providing an exhaustive list of powers.
The Second rule is, “Discover the facts and truths presented in a given passage and note the exact wording of the text.”
According to M. Stanton Evans in the book, “The Theme is Freedom”,
“No one familiar with our current federal government would dream of calling its powers “few and defined”-or describing the boundaries of its authority as “unalterable” and “fixed”. The situation, as everyone knows, is the reverse. How has it been possible to deduce a system of unlimited national power from these arrangements, and still maintain that we are living under the federal constitution? The answer to this question, as provided by liberal scholars and the courts, is most ingenious yet.
The favored approach in this regard, already noted, has been to take particular phrases in the Constitution-”general welfare”, “necessary and proper”, “commerce”- and construe these as independent grants of power, affecting all kinds of things that were not confided to the national jurisdiction. Since these phrases might be made to mean anything whatever, there is little in this doctrine that is exempt from federal preemption, subsidy, or regulation. What may notbe done, for instance, that doesn’t affect the “general welfare”, or “commerce”, in some fashion? Thus has our system of supposedly limited government, under a binding constitution, become a regime of dominant power.
As it happens, such arguments were fully anticipated in the ratification struggle, since opponents of the constitution had said these phrases might be interpreted this way and the supporters categorically denied it. This discussion makes clear that the phrases had no such meaning, and could not conceivably had done so-precisely because the system was one of limited powers. Hamilton said, for instance, that “necessary and proper was a “tautology”, not an independent grant of power. Madison called the protest over “general welfare” a measure of anti-federalist desperation-”stooping to such a misconstruction.”
“For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, he asked, “if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power?” The identical phrases had been included, more than once, in the Articles of Confederation: “Construe either of these articles by the rules which would justify the construction put on the new constitution, and they vest in the existing Congress a power to legislate in a cases whatsoever.” Viewing “general welfare” as an independent grant of power, he concluded, was “an absurdity.”
So it was-and is. Yet this absurdity has long since become the ruling theory of our courts, and the premises for a boundless exercise of federal power. It is in consequence of such reasoning that the national government today involves itself in welfare spending of all types, extensive regulation of the economy, employment training, health care programs, education, criminal justice, care of children, and countless other functions that were, by the repeated witness of the Founders, to have been the jurisdiction of the states, and were understood that way by the people who ratified the Constitution.”
Madison also states in Federalist no. 41 , “Nothing is more natural nor common than first to use a general phrase, and then explain and qualify it by a recital of particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, is an absurdity, which, as we are reduced to the dilemma of charging either on the authors of the objection or the authors of the Constitution, we must take the liberty of supposing, had not its origin with the latter.”
The Constitution is clear. Congress shall provide the general welfare by the particular powers provided succeeding it. The “general welfare” clause is not an independent grant of power. All the evidence from the founders prove this, and common sense and literary rules also back this supposition. If we held our representatives accountable, and actually did our part to uphold our republic, this blatant disregard for liberty and the rule of law would not occur. No national healthcare, no federal student aid, and no other subsidies. Conservatives and libertarians, especially, NEED to know this. it is as Benjamin Franklin once said after arriving home from the Constitutional Convention of 1787, “It’s a republic-if you can keep it.” Will you?
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