Palau, in order to answer your question, I first need to talk about constitutional philosophy so that you may understand my intent.
The Constitution does two things. First, it delegates certain powers to the federal government. Second, it separates those powers among the three branches.
None of the delegated powers of Congress covers Social Security, or Medicaid, or Medicare, or federal aid to education, or public works projects, or countless regulations of business, or the space program, or farm subsidies, or research grants, or on and on...
Constitutional and unconstitutional aren’t just simple terms of approval and disapproval. A bad law may be perfectly constitutional. A wise and humane law may be unconstitutional.
The logic of the Constitution was so elegantly simple that a foreign observer could explain it to his countrymen in two sentences. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:
“the attributes of the federal government were carefully defined [in the Constitution], and all that was not included among them was declared to remain to the governments of the individual states. Thus the government of the states remained the rule, and that of the federal government the exception.”
The Constitution was the instrument by which the American people granted, or delegated, certain specific powers to the federal government. Any power not delegated was withheld, or “reserved.” These principles are expressed particularly in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Amendments conveniently forgotten about when focused on "general welfare" desires to expand federal governmental powers. |
